Kofta Curry

[nakji]

I picked up a copy of Madhur Jaffrey's "From Curries to Kebabs: Exploring the Spice Trail of India" over the summer at the library, copied out some recipes, and now that the weather's gotten a little cooler, have started making some. My first attempt was her chickpea curry recipe, which I think will become a household standard for me. My second attempt was for a Kofta curry, which also came out exceptionally well.

I mentioned over in the meatball topic that I wanted to freeze the koftas and freeze them for a few days before making the curry. The recipe calls for making the kofta mixture and then holding it for several hours before proceeding with the rest of the curry. Instead, I fried the koftas up on a Sunday, froze them, defrosted them Wednesday night in the fridge for a curry I made the Thursday evening. Came off without a hitch, and yielded a curry with exceptionally nice flavour, I thought. This was the first time I've made a curry using more broth than anything else - say tomatoes, coconut milk, or yogurt - as a base, and I thought it would be rather bland. It wasn't. In fact, it was one of the nicest curries I've had in a while. The sauce the meatballs cooked in was basically made up of several cups of beef broth, onions and aromatics, spices, and a bit of tomato. Very simple and easy to crack out on a week night - the only hard part was waiting the twenty minutes for the sauce to cook down a bit.

My husband really enjoyed the koftas, and I'm interested to hear if there are other methods or sauces for making a kofta curry.

[v. gautam]

Erin,

There is a UNIVERSE of different kofta types, and another UNIVERSE of SAUCES, and a THIRD UNIVERSE of RICE dishes and other things prepared with kofte, plural of kofta!!! Then there are kofte prepared with ingredients other than meat, e.g. fish, shrimp, various types of vegetables, spinach, types of root vegetables etc.

Let us start with one type, the cuisine of the Kashmiri Pandits, who do not use onions or garlic. Their defining flavors are powdered dry ginger [sonth], powdered fennel seed, green cardamom and yoghurt. A few other things like mustard oil and some other spices may be used. Please note that aniseed is a misnomer for fennel.

The gravies are thin. Lamb is used, and you may wish to prepare a light bone stock [trotters are excellent] with a piece of ginger and green cardamon and black pepper to give some substance.

http://www.koausa.org/Cookbook/190.html

http://www.indiacurry.com/spice/yakhnisauce.htm

http://www.curryhouse.co.uk/catw/brent3.htm

If you have the appetite for more kofte in the Indian repertoire, you only have to ask. It depends on how patient you are, how involved you want to get, what spices you want to buy, etc.