Bloke's Cookbook - Sweet Potato Curry

I'm teaching a chum to cook. Like most modern men, he's not received any instruction in the functions of the kitchen, beyond 'This is the fridge, it is for beer'. It'll be an uphill struggle but in the interests of chumdom, and of proving that any man can cook given sufficient training, I'm going to show him how.

He's a vegetarian. Not completely vegetarian, I might add - there's the occasional slip if there's something truly awesome on the table or if he's simply very hungry, but someone who's made the commitment out of conscience and is only intermittently weak when, for example, a friend decides to torture him by preparing a leg of slow-cooked venison.

So this evening I'm showing him a simple curry. By 'simple' I mean that there's no clever preparation required, just organisation.

The basis of this curry is the Lamb Rogan Josh recipe that I posted some months ago. As a result, most of this post is just a copy/paste from the old one. I found out that it translates very effectively into a vegetarian dish. There are two advantages to making it with sweet potato. Firstly there's no need to marinade, which leaves space in the fridge and cuts down on preparation time. Secondly the cooking time is shorter - about an hour instead of two hours.

Sweet potato responds to cooking in the same way as parsnip does. It becomes very soft and fluffy and cooks fast. Compared to normal potato, even starchy potato, the texture is much softer.

This dish should serve 8 people if you accompany it with naan bread and rice, 4-6 if you don't.

Ingredients:

2 large sweet potatoes;
1 large onion;
1 large pot plain yoghurt;
1 400g tin plum tomatoes;
Tomato puree;
8 cloves garlic;
8 fresh chillies;
1 inch ginger;
Cumin seeds;
Cardomom pods;
Bay leaves;
Large bunch fresh coriander;
Olive oil or ghee;
Juice of 1 lemon.

Equipment:

Large crockpot, heavy wok or deep saucepan, preferably with a lid.

Chop the onions, finely chop the garlic, and chop the chillies in to pieces. You don't have to put chillies in at all if you don't like spicy food. If you do, then feel free to bung in as many as you think you'll enjoy. You can leave out the chilli seeds if you want the chilli flavour but less heat. Finally, chop the coriander.

Peel the sweet potatoes, and cut them in to larger-than-bite-size chunks. The reason for this is that sweet potato cooks fast, and falls to bits when it does. If you want a litre of oily orange goop as your curry, cut it small. If you want something with texture, cut it bigger.

Fling a good-sized lump of ghee or a hefty dollop of olive oil into your cooking receptacle. Ghee is more authentic although I can't really tell the difference in flavour. Heat the pan until the ghee/oil is hot and then pour in a couple of teaspoons worth of cumin seeds. Fry for 2 minutes. Then add a bay leaf and half a dozen cardomom pods. Fry for 2 more minutes. Put in the chopped garlic and the chillies. Fry for 2 more minutes then add the onion. Stir everything up and make sure nothing burns. Fry for several minutes, at least until the onion goes translucent and soft and preferably until it starts to brown.

At this point, add the chopped sweet potato and yoghurt to the pan. Mix it all in well, making sure the yoghurt and potato is very thoroughly mixed in with the spices. Keep stirring, and you'll end up with a thick mixture where the yoghurt has formed into tiny lumps. That's fine.

Now add the tin of tomatoes, chopped, wash the tin with tap water until it's about half full, and pour the half tin of tomato/tap water into the mix. Now add at least a tablespoon of tomato puree. Stir everything in for a couple of minutes, because it'll take a while for the puree to mix.

Now, cover and leave to simmer for between 45 minutes and an hour. Stir it a couple of times if you want, but it's really a recipe where you can leave it to do its own thing.

If, after 45 minutes, you find that the sauce is too runny, then take the lid off the pot, turn the heat up to get it bubbling and give it 15-20 minutes like that - although you can expect to have to wash your hob and your surfaces down after.

During this time, you can sort your rice and naan breads out as you see fit. My 'steamed rice' recipe can be found here.


Drink with: Cobra beer.

Ease of cooking and preparation: 3/5 - No special skills are required but the cooking is slow and there's lots to remember.

Mess Factor: 4/5 - A few peelings, lots of tidying up and a large pan to wash up. Pretty good.

Leftover value: 3/5 - On this occasion I didn't get to find out, since my chum managed to eat a serving for 4 people entirely on his own. However, I've had it cold for lunch in the past and it's been good. Not as good as the Rogan Josh, but good.