Review: The Curry Bible: The Ultimate Indian Cookbook Featuring 100 Classic Recipes

The Curry Bible: The Ultimate Indian Cookbook Featuring 100 Classic Recipes by Nisha Katona
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

The strength of this book is that the recipes are quite simple.

This is also its weakness, in that the detail they leave out is probably the difference between an OK recipe and a good recipe. Also, some of them just don't seem quite right to me.

I made the aubergine and potato curry. Most of the vegetarian recipes feature potatoes, not my favourite vegetable, but I suppose I can substitute. I didn't substitute, though, and made it basically as written, except that my "large" 500g aubergine/eggplant was almost twice as large as the "large" 300g one the recipe specifies, and the recipe says to cut it into 8 pieces, which I thought would be too big (even if I went for 16 pieces to allow for the difference), so I cut it about the size specified for the potatoes, 3cm. This gives a very rustic result, and it's difficult to get the potatoes cooked through. I happened to have more potatoes than called for, too, in about the same proportion as the eggplant, so I increased the spices slightly to compensate. I didn't double them, and was glad I hadn't; I think that would have been too strong for me. As it was, it made a pleasant curry, with slightly undercooked potatoes even though I gave them extra cooking time. I will probably make it again, but substitute carrots for the potatoes and cut everything smaller.

To accompany the curry, I made the roti recipe. The texture came out a bit cardboardy, which didn't surprise me much, since, comparing with other recipes, 10 minutes is a very short time to rest the dough after kneading, and a lot of the recipes call for resting it again after rolling into balls. Coating the dough ball in plenty of oil worked well for cooking them on the griddle without creating burned-on carbon, though, so I will take that approach with other flatbreads in future. They tasted OK, but with so few ingredients that also wasn't surprising.

The spice mix section at the front is probably the best thing in the book from my perspective, and I will be using it. I made one of the mixes as part of the curry recipe, and it was good, though, again, I probably wouldn't have enjoyed it as much if I'd used more of it.

Not a complete fail, but not one of the great cookbooks either.

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