Hello in this video, I'm going to do something a little bit different,
I'm going to cook a curry, it's a Saturday night tradition in our house and I've always
been pretty good at making curries, but you know what, during the lockdown, I've absolutely
nailed it, so I thought I'd do a video on the subject, fancy joining me welcome to RogVLOG,
this is a bit of an experiment so I hope you'll bear with me, tonight i'm going to be cooking
my version of a chicken madras, now normally a chicken madras is just meat in a very rich
quite spicy sauce, but I quite like onions and lots of mushrooms as well, so it's going to be a
little bit different to the traditional chicken madras you get in a restaurant, so technically
we're talking chicken mushroom and onion madras, first up we need some base gravy, now I make these
in advance in batches, and it's effectively just a load of onions, a can of tomatoes,
a bit of garlic, a bit of ginger, and it's all cooked together with chicken stock, and then
get a blender out and liquidise it, see, and we use this to enrich the curry as we're cooking it,
and it helps to stop the spices from burning, but it also adds an incredible amount of flavor
to the curry, I'm not going to specifically show you how to make the base gravy tonight,
but there are loads of videos on YouTube that you can find which gives you a recipe
for the base gravy, first of all I'm going to cut up the chicken into cubes,
we need one onion and Ii'm going to chop that up into little petals,
as many mushrooms as you can handle, and I particularly like these brown chestnut mushrooms,
I always cut the mushrooms up really thin so that when I cook them,
they get nice and browned and nutty quite quickly, we're going to make a paste out of garlic,
and out of ginger, and we're going to use a garlic press on both of these items,
give it a squeeze over the ramekin, I'm going to use that knife just to scrape
the ginger down, and now the same with the garlic, oh there you go, let's give it a little mix up,
that ginger and garlic smells incredible, to add a little bit of kick to the curry we want
some green bird eye chillies, now these are ferociously hot so the way that I use them
is I put them in the sauce at the start, and I cook them,
but take them out before serving so that nobody inadvertently gets a mouthful of this,
because you get one of these in your mouth, it's going to blow your head off,
all I'm going to do with those hot bird eye chillis, is just slice them slightly,
we're going to need some tomato puree and I'm going to dilute that with a little bit of water,
and that again is going to add flavour to the sauce, into another ramekin I'm going to put
two teaspoons worth and then add about half a ramekin of water and mix it up to create a
lovely tomato sauce, we want to make a combination of curry powder and spice powders, and this is one
of the crucial ingredients for my curry recipe, so for this one we're going to start off with a
about half a teaspoon of paprika, smoked paprika powder, about half a teaspoon of ground cumin,
again about half a teaspoon of turmeric, love that yellow colour that turmeric brings to curries,
and about two teaspoonfuls of general madras curry powder, this is hot chilli powder, I'm
gonna put about a quarter of a teaspoon into the mix, now you might want to add a little bit more
if you want your curry to be hotter, here's that combination of curry spices in the ramekin, and
we're just gonna mix all of those together, good, can you see that
turmeric, that is just gorgeous isn't it, and again the smells from this are just incredible,
and with our curry tonight I'm also going to make some beautiful flatbreads, now these are
really well worth investing the time in making, and they're really simple, all you need is flour,
salt and water, and they are absolutely delicious, so this is half a bowl full of self-raising flour,
and we're gonna put some salt in it, and I really like these pink Himalayan salts,
I'm going to mix it up with a fork, and now I'm going to add some water,
this is where it gets a bit icky, I'm going to mix up that flour,
if you put too much water in just top it up with a bit of flour, so you get this sort of
gloopiness, I told you I'm not a chef, so my terminology is absolutely awful,
what we need to do is we need to put some flour down on the worktop,
tip that gunk, gunk, did I say gunk, I'm gonna put that down into the flour,
we can start to use our hands to manipulate it, and to knead it,
oh I really love this bit it reminds me of being a child and playing with plasticine and play-doh,
just give it a bit of a mix around, you're gonna get the worktop really messy doing this, and
we're going to leave that to mature, so time to get cooking and the first
thing we're going to do is take that base sauce and dilute it a bit and heat it up,
next, let's brown off the chicken in a little rapeseed oil,
don't you just love the sound of the sizzle, now let's scoop out the chicken and save it for later,
oh it's getting a bit warm in the kitchen and I can't put the extractor fan
on because of the noise, now once that base gravy is boiling reduce it to simmer and just
have it handy because we're going to need it constantly through the rest of the recipe,
next we're going to cook those mushrooms and we're cooking those in advance as well so that they're
nice and brown, and we can put them into the curry right at the last minute, the mushrooms are nice
and brown now so we're going to scoop them out and put them in a bowl and keep them for later,
that's all the prep done it's now time to cook the curry, the first thing we're gonna do is to put
some cardamom pods into the oil, sorry I forgot to tell you about the cardamom pods earlier on,
next in those bird eye chillis,
listen to that snap crackle and pop, we're cooking over a medium heat here,
next let's add those gorgeous onion petals into the pan,
next in goes that fantastic garlic and ginger paste that we made earlier,
now we want to take the edge off that garlic but we don't want to burn it so if you need to
just pop a little half ladle full of that base gravy into the pan,
and it will stop the garlic from burning
and this is where the smells are going to get incredible,
we're going to add that ramekin full of spices into the pan and then mix it in,
oh, that smells incredible, but we don't want those spices to burn,
so again we can add a little bit of that base sauce to prevent that,
the onions and the base sauce caramelise against the side of the pan,
adding sweetness and flavour to the sauce, now let's add that tomato sauce to the pan,
oh, just look at that it's starting to look like a curry already and this smells amazing,
now we're gonna add a couple of ladles of that base sauce, again this is going to add even more
flavour and as that caramelises and renders down it makes the curry really rich and deep,
you can see that sauce bubbling, and the oil separates from the sauce which
gives it that fantastic British Indian restaurant look and feel,
and this is usually the time that I fish out those bird eye chillis just in case the curry
gets too hot, but if you like it hot leave them in, this is coming together so well so I'm now
going to put the chicken and the mushrooms into the curry and then we're almost there,
definitely getting hotter now, we just want the curry to mature so I'm going to keep adding scoops
of base gravy into the sauce just to thicken it up, just to
deepen the flavour you can do this as many times as you like,
while that curry is maturing we're going to make the flatbreads, so what I'm going to do
is I'm going to divide that blob of dough that we created earlier into four smaller blobs of dough,
and then I'm going to get a rolling pin and roll them out really nice and big and flat,
and then all we need to do is put them in a pan and cook them,
now as you cook the flatbreads you're going to notice them getting little bubbles coming up all
over the top, leave it for a few moments until there are quite a few bubbles before you flip
the flatbread over to the other side,
and we're almost ready to plate, last thing we're going to do before that is we're going to add
a few fenugreek leaves to the pot, I forgot to tell you about this ingredient earlier as well,l
these are also known as methi leaves, well that's it let's plate it and let's eat it,
I'm gonna chop up a few pieces of coriander, I think that's another ingredient I forgot isn't it,
and then we're gonna tuck into this fabulous chicken madras with mushrooms and onions,
that is fantastic and the best way to taste the depth of the sauce is to use that flatbread
almost like a spoon,
that is so so good, and I was quite economic with the chillis wasn't I, didn't put much
chilli powder in, and I took those chillis, those bird eye chillis, out quite early but
it's actually quite hot, it's got a bit of a punch to it
my mouth's tingling, that was lovely, I really enjoyed that curry and you know what I really
enjoyed filming the cookery process as well, I've never done anything like that before
and it was really interesting to try and set the cameras up and avoid them getting
splattered in curry sauce, of course, from different angles and the lighting
in the kitchen as well, so I hope you enjoyed this rather different episode
of RogVLOG, if you did enjoy the episode, please do consider subscribing to my YouTUbe channel,
and until the next video remember there's always something to see so get out there and find it.