Recipe Result: Flavor was... acceptable. Texture was an epic fail.
I'll be making all Indian dishes this week, and Sunday night I started things off with a coconut chicken curry. I settled on this one since it looked pretty authentic (no pre-mixed curry powder) and I'd never worked with dried, grated coconut before. I made a few changes to the ingredient list, just to yield a little less than the original recipe would turn out; not to mention some of it is pretty vague. I mean, "15 medium sized pieces of chicken." Way to be specific. Here's what I used:
- 1lb boneless, skinless chicken thighs, cut into small pieces
- 1 yellow/sweet onion, maybe 3" in diameter (I made thinly sliced half rings)
- 1 cup dried, grated coconut
- 4 large cloves of garlic
- 2 tsp, each, of coriander, cayenne pepper, julienne sliced ginger
- [forgot to buy red and green chilis]
- heaping 1/2 tsp turmeric
- 8 curry leaves
- a little more than 2 Tbsp of vegetable oil
- 1 cup water
- salt to taste (came out to maybe 2 tsp or more)
Yielded about 3 servings
I basically followed the cooking directions as given. For grinding the toasted coconut into a paste, I used about 3/4 cup of water and put it all into my food processor. That was the first mistake. "Grinding" in the processor didn't do a damn thing about the granularity of the coconut, even after letting the pot simmer for 20 min or more. That's what I mean about a step in a recipe being totally intuitive to the writer, but could be lost on the reader.
The other mistake was the 2 tsp of cayenne. I like my food spicy. But that much cayenne all at once while toasting the coconut kind of made it hard to taste-test for adding salt... and made it tough to breathe near the stove.
Lesson learned: Stick with coconut milk. Or if choose to use grated coconut again, use a big mortar and pestle to really smooth it out. As it turned out, the sauce the mouth-feel of sawdust suspended in water.
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