Why hello there, and welcome back to Kitchen Catastrophe, where we’re constantly pushing boundaries into just how much land we can annex from Canada. Soon, I’ll have an entire stoplight. I’m your Territorial Thief, Jon O’Guin, and today’s topic is a weird mix of messy and complicated meeting simple and easy. For those who just want to get cooking, here’s the link. Everyone else, let’s dig in.

24 Carrot Magic

So, you’ve read the title, you know what’s coming. This is a post about Carrot Curry. And that gives me some time to discuss the interesting history of carrots, and my personal relationship with them.

These ones specifically bullied me in high school.

Carrots have been around for quite some time, probably. I say “probably” because, as you are probably unaware: carrots weren’t originally orange. Carrots were initially WHITE, though they eventually developed into yellow and red varieties, from which the orange arose, and other colors have appeared over time. But the problem with white carrots is…parsnips.

Shown here, maybe. Can you tell?
Yes. Parsnips have a more bulbous head (heh).

Yeah, it turns out “the weird herb with the thick white root” was kind of hard to distinguish from ‘the OTHER weird herb with the thick white root”. And that very much was how the vegetable was originally seen: Carrots and Parsnips were originally grown for their LEAVES and SEEDS, with the root being an afterthought that someone eventually wrote down “CAN be cooked and eaten”. The two are both members of the same family, though of different genuses (and it’s a BIG family: we’re talking celery, cilantro, dill, asafetida, fennel, cumin, parsley, fucking HEMLOCK…) But yeah, carrots have been around for quite a while. (as a small fun fact: once the roots were discovered to hold sugar fairly well, carrots and parsnips became the go-to option for “we can’t reasonably add honey to this dish, and we don’t know about sugar, so here’s how we can make this a little sweeter.”)

And for a long time, I probably would have called them my ‘favorite’ vegetable. I like the crunch of a good carrot, I liked the weird thorny inner section that you could pry out with careful excavation (if you’ve never done so, the descriptor of ‘thorny” may sound weird, but I assure you, it’s accurate: the inner root of the carrot is where attempts to create new root pathways START, so if you take a carrot and peel off the outer layer, you’ll find a spree of tiny little ‘points’, like floppy thorns, or soft peaks in whipped cream.) Unless I’m just completely misremembering my childhood.

I think another reason young me liked them was the eyes thing: carrots have a long-standing reputation of being food for vision/night-vision. Which, as it turns out, is a lie. Kind of. See, yes, if you have a vitamin A deficiency, carrots will help you see better. But for normal people, they don’t do anything. People THINK they do, because during World War 2, Britain urged people to grow carrots in gardens to support the war effort, claiming that their surplus of carrots gave their fighter pilots sharper night-vision…which was a lie to A: provide the barest cover for the fact that they had developed better radar, and better console lights, and B: give people something to focus on. Carrots are easy to grow, and useful in many forms of cooking, so giving people a war-time reason to grow more gently steered them into making something useful.

That’s right, Billy! You too can help our million-dollar murder machines by growing a vegetable worth mere cents!

And given that it was discovered that I needed glasses in the fifth grade, it’s entirely possible a child-like interest in making my eyes better was part of my like of them. Or maybe I was just mimicking Bugs Bunny. There’s a lot of possibilities.

So, with the carrots covered, let’s tackle curry.

Curry On My Wayward Son

Oh man, that reminds me that Supernatural ended a couple months ago. That is wild to think about, since I can distinctly recall like, 7 years ago, doing an Improv scene where I (gently) mocked the show. Man, the cultural timeline of my generation is WEIRD. Some shows never die, some die young but are long remembered (in the same game, I also mocked Firefly), while others run a seemingly healthy length, but fall apart in the end.

I was going to make a Game of Thrones joke here, but I decided to instead use this, so that the Tumblr people know that I speak their code.
I watch Sarah Z. I vaguely understand Destiel-stans and Oncelet…ites? I forget what the Onceler Fandom is called. “Teen Girl Horny Jail?”

Anyhow, today’s curry is…look, remember when I expressed some concerns about labeling Indian cuisine back when I was talking about Chutneys? I assure you, the same minefield of issues lies in discussion of “curries”. My research indicates there are at LEAST 40+ different TYPES of curries. Which, to clarify/re-assert, the word “curry”, just means “sauce”. It has GROWN to encompass something closer to “a spiced stew/cooked spice paste”, but like, that’s 40 different base flavor profiles to which different meats can be added, and various cooks can riff on in different ways. A survey in 1998 of 48 different recipes for Chicken TIkka Masala found that the only thing they all agreed on is that it had CHICKEN in it

So when I tell you that today’s recipe “feels like José Andres’s attempt at a vegetable tikka masala”, I want it on record that I know I’m wading into some shit. BUT, in my personal opinion, the comparison holds: it is a not-particularly spicy curry base, consisting mainly of tomato and carrot, with garam spices, and coconut milk. That SOUNDS like a lot of tikka recipes I’ve read. Or like…Butter Chicken without the Butter or Chicken.

Look, that SOUNDS like nonsense, but people who’ve had Butter Chicken will probably say this looks like it.

And I kind of like the tone José uses to introduce the recipe, stating that Indian food is a very different methodology and goalset to his Spanish culinary roots, and that he’s been lucky to work with great Indian chefs who have helped him through a world of spices where even he, a professional chef, has often felt lost. He notes that he was “halfway through his life” before he encountered Star Anise or Garam Masala. And that’s really cool to hear, because it reminds us all that everyone starts somewhere, and even Michelin-starred chefs didn’t come into the world knowing all the spices. Hell, José was working at elBulli before he learned what Star Anise was. That’s very inspiring, to me. BUT ENOUGH SET-UP, let’s get cooking!

Time Keeps on Slippin’

I want it noted that if you add up all the times presented in the recipe, you will think this is a 70 minute recipe. In my house, it took closer to 170, for a variety of reasons. The first, and the ancient enemy of my people, was mise-en-place. One of the first steps for the recipe was to hand-grate 2 pounds of plum tomatoes.

Look kids, it’s Grat-o the Clown! Don’t hug him.

This is because the way the grater shreds the tomato is more helpful in causing it to break down than other methods, or so food professionals I trust tell me. And, once you get the rhythm of it, it’s kind of fun/cool: the peel tends to get pushed away from the holes, meaning the tomato skin serves as a kind of built-in finger protector. It took like, 5-10 minutes, but overall, it wasn’t TOO bad.

GRAT-O! OH GOD THE CHILDREN.

And it’s one of only three real “work” tasks in the recipe: you gotta mince up some shallots, grate the tomatoes, and peel and chop some carrots. Everything else is just “measure, dump, and wait.” Well, no, technically there’s ONE other step: toast. Specifically, you’ve gotta toast your spices. The recipe calls for cinnamon sticks, star anise, cardamom pods, and garam masala mix.

The interesting thing to that combination is that the first three ingredients are usually IN the last one, but it’s much easier to modify an existing mix than to start your own from scratch. Toast your spices for 30 seconds or so, just enough so you can really smell them, and then you can move them off the heat to cool for a little bit. Or do it at the same time as the next task, which is ‘lightly brown the minced shallots in oil”.

If you study the shallots closely, you can see Grat-o’s dark master, Shall-Smiley.

Once your shallots are a little browned, add the spices, the tomato puree, and a QUART of carrot juice, along with a quarter cup of lime juice. Bring to a simmer, and let bubble for 30 minutes, until the sauce can coat the back of a spoon.

That guideline became problematic in my house, because the actual instructions were “cook gently”, so turned down the heat after it started simmering, and after 30 minutes, my sauce was NOT ready. Maybe it’s my old stove, maybe it’s being too cautious with the heat, maybe it’s both, but after taking 7-8 minutes to come to a simmer, I then needed another 10-15 to get the sauce to a point Nate and I vaguely agreed was “coating” the spoon, and at the end, I felt like one of two things had gone wrong.

Meanwhile, it’s time for some FANCY SHIT. Specifically, this recipe calls for the MOST EXPENSIVE SPICE IN THE WORLD: SAFFRON.

I keep mine like this because, as a white guy, keeping valuable goods in small plastic bags is far less lethal for me than others.

Saffron is super expensive, because it has to be hand-harvest from flowers that only bloom at specific times, in a relatively narrow space. Like, you have ONE WEEK to harvest 3 stems from each flower. It takes 450 stems to make 1 gram of the dried spice which can cost $10. It’s a controversial spice, with some claiming it has a cilantro-esque issue of some people processing it differently, with others claiming that such instances are the result of inferior product: artificial saffron of lower quality, with its rarity and cost making it hard to pinpoint which is which. Does my brother think saffron tastes like detergent because the restaurant he ate at bought the cheap stuff, or is it a genetic thing? I don’t know, and I don’t presently have the funds to find out. Give me money, and we’ll explore this in more detail.

Anywho, you only need like, a fifth of a gram for this, so it’s a MERE $2 in spices. Then you add coconut milk, and stir everything together to allow the flavors to meld. Once sufficiently melded to your likely, take it off the heat and fish out the toasted spices that you can: the masala mix will be long gone, but the star anise, cardamom, and cinnamon sticks all come out. And let me emphasize here: because this step exists, try to only use full, completely intact star anise and cardamom: I figured it wouldn’t hurt to use a couple chunks of the anise, and we ended up spending 5 whole minutes skimming the curry base to find the little broken off flanges.

Once separated, puree until smooth, and add chopped and peeled carrots.

I, uh… tossed them in the pot before I took a picture.

Bring to a simmer, pop a lid on, and cook until carrots are softened, which took us about 15-20 minutes, because I realized when the recipe called for ‘large’ carrots, they meant the big hearty carrots that are almost 2 inches across, while we were using ‘normal’ carrots. Then, rather than make a 20 minute recipe for “really good Garlic Rice”, we reheated some kimchi Fried Rice for 4 minutes in the microwave, and served, topping the curry with lime juice and coconut milk, with each of us approaching the composition of our bowl in our own way. My mother, for instance, had a bowl of curry and a cup of rice, while Nate went with the “curry over rice” angle.

A good showing, though the coconut milk looks a LITTLE weird.

I myself used the “side rice” method, where I lightly pressed my rice on the edge of the bowl, before ladling in the curry in the middle.

Not bad, but the inability to see any carrots really hurts the composition of the shot. It looks more like tomato soup. I gotta go with Nate’s for the cover.

Flavorwise…it’s good, but I think several of our missteps ended up hurting us: for one thing, Our recipe only used 4 shallots instead of 6, since two of them had gone bad between buying the ingredients and making the dish. Second, I think the spice level was off: firstly on the grounds that directly our Star Anise and cardamom were past their expiration date, but they SMELLED fine so we used them, but that could have muted their flavor in the final product, and to my personal taste we could have incorporated something for a little heat/smokiness: maybe some smoked paprika, or red pepper flakes…, something to more strongly offset the sweetness of the carrots, implicit sweetness of the masala spices, and acidity of the tomatoes and lime juice. Lastly, I think we under-reduced the base, which combined with our dinkier than intended carrots to turn the curry into something closer to a soup. The texture and flavor didn’t feel diluted, there was just a LOT of sauce versus not a lot of carrot. It was good, but not great. Nate framed it as ‘It ticks all the boxes of a curry, and it doesn’t have any negatives…it just also doesn’t have very many positives’. I framed it as a “6/10”, and was agreed with. With another pass or two, you can probably easily get this to an 8 or 9 out of 10, in a recipe that gives you the time to work for a bit, wander off and watch an episode of something, fiddle in the middle, watch another episode, and serve.

It’s not perfect. But neither is it a catastrophe.

THURSDAY: THE BOOK

MONDAY: JON CELEBRATES ST PADDY’S DAY WITH SOME LEEKS, CREAM, AND BROWN CRUNCHY BITS.

Time for the

Recipe

Carrot Curry

Makes 4 -5 servings

Ingredients

Spice Mix

10 star anise pods

8 cardamom pods

2 cinnamon sticks

1 1/2 tbsps garam masala

Curry

2 lbs plum tomatoes, halved lengthwise

2 tbsps canola oil

6 shallots, minced (about 3/4 cup)

4 cups pure carrot juice

¼ cup fresh lime juice

Pinch of saffron threads

1 1/3 cups unsweetened coconut milk (A standard can of coconut milk is roughly 5/3 cups, so you can save 1/3 cup for the garnish, and use the rest)

Kosher salt

8 large carrots, peeled and cut into 2- to 3-inch chunks

Garnish: Coconut milk, cilantro leaves, fresh lime juice and zest, rice

Preparation

Grate the tomatoes on the large holes of a box grater held in a bowl to catch all the juice/flesh. Toast all the ingredients of the spice mix in a dry pan over medium heat for around 30 seconds, until fragrant.
In a fairly large saucepan or pot, heat the oil over medium heat. Add the shallots, and cook, stirring until lightly golden, about 3 minutes. Add the toasted spice mix, grated tomatoes, carrot juice and lime juice. Bring to a simmer, and reduce until sauce coats the back of a spoon, roughly 30-40 minutes.
Add the saffron, cook 1 minute, then add coconut milk, cooking 3-5 minutes for flavors to meld. Remove from the heat, and pull solid spices (star anise, cinnamon, cardamom) from the sauce. Blend, using either an immersion blender, or by pouring the soup into a standard blender in batches. Taste and season with salt.
Add carrots, return to heat, and bring back to a simmer. Cover, and let cook until carrots are softened, roughly 20-30 minutes depending on thickness of carrots. Ladle into bowls, garnish, and serve with rice.