The third time’s the charm, that’s what they say.
They, however, are FULL OF CRAP. They say lots of stupid shit.* Sometimes the third time is just the third time.
Can you tell I’m feeling a little let down? Yeah, I thought so. Dinner tonight was – finally – the Bengali chingri malal curry** from Curry Cuisine
*To wit: “A stitch in time saves nine.”
*Or jumbo shrimp in a coconut curry sauce.
And there are lots of reasons it should be incredibly flavorful, like this paste of two inches’ worth of ginger root and ten whole cloves of garlic. You’d think, with all that, that it would taste like SOMETHING, even if it was just garlic and ginger.
Remember that.
And then there’s all the onion. Yes, this looks like a bowl of something creamy and delicious that you might be tempted to scarf with a spoon. You would be wrong, as this is a bowl of onion pureed with oil. So you might think that, at the very least, the dish would taste of onion.
Remember that.
The shrimp are lightly dusted with salt and turmeric before getting quickly seared off in a hot pan. I always think of turmeric as a spice that adds more color than it does flavor, and a rich, sunny color it is; like the marigold of an organic egg yolk. In any case, this would lead you to believe that if nothing else, the dish would taste like shrimp.
Remember that.
After the shrimp came out of the pan, I cooked the onion puree with a few bay leaves in an assload of oil until the excess liquid had been driven off and the onion took on a lovely light brown hue. The ginger-garlic paste got mixed with more turmeric, cumin and water to form a slurry – and who among us can’t appreciate a fine slurry? – that got mixed into the cooked onion and sauteed for another seven or eight minutes.
Yes, I know what this looks like: dog vomit. It really does; I’ve been around a lot of dog vomit in my day, and the resemblance is uncanny. Maybe the likeness to hork should have been a harbinger of things to come.
Once all the aromatics cook together, you toss in a couple of chiles that have been slit down the middle. I couldn’t find any super-hot Thai death chiles, so I used the ubiquitous and boring yet perfectly servicable jalapeño. To try and eke out the maximum amount of spice, I sliced them straight down the middle and threw them into the sauce base with ribs and seeds intact to simmer for a few minutes.
You might suppose that, failing anything else, the dish would have a bit of heat.
Remember that.
I stirred some coconut milk into the aromatics and nestled the shrimp in to finish cooking through in the sauce. While they did, I ground up a few green cardmom pods to create a fragrant dust that is sprinkled on top of the finished dish.
A moment of conjecture might lead to the belief that even in the absence of all other flavors, the dish would taste of the freshly ground cardmom that’s added at the last possible minute.
Remember that.
I poured the finished curry into a serving bowl and left it to sit for a moment while I fluffed and plated some white rice. Each bowl got a generous helping of shrimp and sauce.
To recap the flavor potential:
- Massive amounts of aromatics: CHECK
- Goodly amounts of spices: CHECK
- Fresh chile peppers: CHECK
- Thick, full-fat coconut milk: CHECK
Remember that.
Yes, remember it well, and MARVEL at the utter lack of any flavor in the finished dish. Some blasted alchemy is at work here, to take such distinctive ingredients and suck all the life from them. All I really tasted was rice and salt. Yum!
Brian is baffled, and, in trying to make sense of things, posits that the richness of the coconut milk overwhelmed the other ingredients, muting their flavors. I am not sold on this explanation – it didn’t even taste of coconut, for the love of Pete – and continue to chalk it up to black magic.
Maybe it’s a sign of some perfect ratio: maybe all the flavors in the dish are so precisely balanced that they cancel one another out completely.
Whatever the reason, the result is the same: disappointment,* coupled with a craving for some good tikka masala. Dammit.
*Let this not be a reflection on the cookbook, which has served me well on numerosu occasions and which I will continue to recommend.
Thursday Night Smackdown 
Is the silver lining here unscorched rice?
I vote for black magic. How something that looked so amazing with so many great individual flavors turned out to be rice-and-salt flavored is beyond me. Someone must have put a pox on your ingredients..
Well it looks like a vindaloo from here.
My experience is that (over)cooking this many different tastes and textures together tends to result in porridge, gumbo, vindaloo, or slop. This is baffling to me, because I’ve seen indian friends cook something like this using both methodologies, and it comes out either way. But for me, it only comes out this way:
Roast or saute the garlic separately, then pound it and the ginger together without further cooking.
Saute the onion in butter (unless I was using a flavored oil) and set it aside after I got a dark caramelization.
Cook some rice in the coconut milk, sear the shrimp, and saute some hot peppers in a tablespoon of oil.
At the last minute, combine the other ingredients and then serve it over the rice.
You remain one of my few (less than the fingers on one hand) “check this blog everyotherday” folks, and I want to express my appreciation for your work. Thank you.
I think you probably offended Shiva at some point in a past life. Give it up.
Stay safe. No more to say.
Maybe it needs some acid to help wake up the flavor? Usually I’m wanting salt, but it sounds like you’ve got enough of that.