As soon as I drop off Little Miss Chatty at school, I have to think about what we are going to have for supper. If I haven’t got all ingredients for the menu, I have to go shopping, etc. Also I cannot cook supper during LMC’s homework time. Sometimes she comes back home later than usual because of after school activities, etc.
Tonight, I would like to cook curry. Japanese style curry. Curry is our national meal, as same as in UK. But English first introduced it, not Indian, so it was said to be English (British?) dish. Then Japanese cooks arranged it into something that suits to Japanese taste.
On India’s honour, I have to say Indians also contributed to Japanese curry culture. During Indian Independence movement, Rash Behari Bose, who was said too be the leader of Delhi conspiracy case, fled to Japan. Japan and Britain at that time had the Anglo-Japanese Alliance Treaty, so Japanese government was furious that Rash Behari Bose was in Japan, but there were some sympathizers, and one of them was Aizo Soma, the founder of Nakamura-ya, the restaurant that is famous for its curry rice. Bose hid himself at Nakamura-ya’s premises and even got married with his daughter. When Nakamura-ya opened its tearoom, Bose helped to introduce Indian style curry. We can eat that curry even now at Nakamura-ya restaurant. And the way how to cook this version had huge influence on development of Japanese style curry, as well.
That is the brief history of Curry in Japan.
If I was in Japan, I can use easy the curry roux shapes like a bar of chocolate. But they are expensive in Japanese super market thanks to weak starling pound and actually, I can make it with ingredients I can find in my kitchen. So I cooked this from scratch. It doesn’t taste fancy as the one cooked with commercial curry roux bar, but it’s nice with less fat, I think.
Here is the translation of the recipe I used;
Ingredients
½ Onion thinly sliced
Diced meat that you like (Pork, Beef, and Chicken are popular choice in Japan) 300ｇ
1 Carrot chopped into small chunks
2 to 3 Potatoes chopped into small chunks
1 tsp of chopped Garlic and gingers each
1 tbls vegetable oil
■Curry roux
30ｇButter
50ｇ Plain flour
1 tbls Curry powder
800cc Soup stock (You can make it with soup powder)
2 tbls Tomato ketchup
2 tbls Worcestershire source (Japanese one is a bit different but British one will do, too.)
1 Apple grated
½ tbls Soy source
1 tsp Salt
1 Bay leaf
Garam Masala
How to cook the roux
- Put butter and plain flour into a small pan; cook them over the low flame until it become brown, currish colour about 15 minutes, not to burn it. The colour of this mixture will determine the colour of finished curry.
- When the roux become curry colour, turn off the flame and mix curry powder, leave it cool.
That’s it for the roux. You can experiment with curry powder but you can use normal curry powders you can find in the supermarket. If you luckily have Curry Roux Bar, just skip this part, and start from the next step. When meat and vegetable were well cooked, just add the roux bar into the pan.
- Fry chopped garlic and ginger, together with onion again with low flame until they become light brown colour.
- Add diced meat and carrot. When the mead it lightly cooked, add soup stock, bay leaf and simmer.
- Pour some soup from the pan we cook vegetables and meat into the small pan of the curry roux; dissolve the roux in the soup. When thoroughly dissolved, you can add this into vegetable/meat pan and mix it.
- Add ketchup, Worcestershire source, soy source, salt, Garam masala and grated apple.
- After simmer it for 10 minutes, add potatoes and simmer 20 minutes more. When potatoes are cooked well, finish cooking.
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