This week we will be making – Chicken Jalfrezi
To celebrate last week’s National Curry Week.
Chicken Jalfrezi is all about big flavours and tops the list as one of the UK’s favourite curries, with tender, juicy chunks of chicken in a spicy tomato sauce studded with stir-fried onions and peppers.
The key to the smoky taste is to blister the green pepper skin when stir frying. Onions and green pepper go in to hot oil and cook until the onion turns brown. The dish requires a lot of prep but less cooking time.
Chicken Jalfrezi doesn’t have a long tradition in India. It was a dish developed by cooks of the British Raj as a way to use up leftovers using a cooking technique introduced by the Chinese. Instead of the braising the chicken and peppers together for hours like most curries, the ingredients for Jalfrezi are quickly stir-fried which preserves the flavour and texture of the peppers and onions.
We will add a secret ingredient, Nigella seeds. The spice is often mislabelled black caraway, black cumin or black onion seeds. It has an anise-like flavour with hints of onion, but Nigella Sativa is unrelated to caraway, cumin or onion. They add a wonderful fresh herbal flavour that takes this dish to a whole new level.
In this week’s dish we will be using the following skills:
Weighing, measuring, peeling, chopping, crushing, boiling/simmering and stir frying/ roasting/browning.
The first National Curry Week took place in 1998
Celebrated each October it applauds the diverse culture in the UK and as a result of this, the many delicious dishes available to us on a daily basis.
National Curry Week has three main aims:
- Honour the nation’s favourite cuisine.
- Celebrate and support the Indian restaurant industry.
- Raise money for poverty focused charities.
#NationalCurryWeek
Donations can be made at http://curryforchange.org.uk/donate making a difference to the lives of families across Asia and Africa.
See you at the weekend Teen Chefs.
