Japanese Curry

I was recently summoned to Holford Towers by His Serene Highness, Lord Michael of Mac to cook an emergency Japanese curry. Desperate straits, Oriental City closed down last week and already the poor old fellow is suffering withdrawal symptoms.

Like a pungent chocolate bar.

It's dead easy to do this curry but like any cooking it's dead easy to 888 it up so just take your time and make sure that you do everything in the right order and it will turn out fine.

Like any stew, the important thing is to have all the ingredients cooked as you want them; there is nothing worse than a meat and vegetable where the meat is still tough and needs another half an hour of cooking but the vegetables are already overdone. So it is all about which cut of meat you are using. I like pork rib steaks, they have a good flavour and are fairly cheap to buy but they do need a good 45-50 minutes stewing to make them tender. Many cooks favour belly pork for a curry; it is a cheap and delicious cut but requires even longer cooking, allow about an hours stewing.

Carrots and Potatoes.

Ingredients and Preparation
5 or 6 Pork rib steaks
500g Carrots
500g Potatoes
2 Large Onions
Box of Japanese curry paste
Water (as per the packet instructions)

Trim and cut the meat into bite-sized pieces. Cut the carrots and potatoes into 1cm chunks. Peel and slice the onions.

The Cooking

Heat some oil in a large pan and fry the onions for a few minutes, then add the meat. Fry the meat and onion mixture for around 5 minutes on a high heat, keep moving the ingredients around in the pot. Do not worry if the meat sticks, it will all be taken care of in the next step.

Add the water to the pan. Either measure it out according to the packet instructions or just add enough to well cover the meat. Cover the pot with its lid and let the water come to the boil. As we are using raw meat you will see that some scum rises to the surface because scum always rises. We are going to skim off the bulk of the scum.

Take a large, preferably perforated, spoon and skim your scum. We don't like scum, nasty stuff. Replace the pot lid, turn the gas down to a simmer and cook for 20 minutes.

After 20 minutes cooking, it's lid off, turn up the heat and get your veggies ready. Add the prepared carrots.

And now in with the prepared potatoes. Bring the pot back to a boil and then turn the heat down to a simmer, replace the lid and cook for a further 15 minutes.

As the stew cooks you can either think beautiful thoughts and open a beer or you can start doing your rice because we are quite near touchdown on planet curry. But don't worry too much about timings, the stew will keep warm and ready in the pot with the lid on waiting for you to do the rice or you can reheat it if needs be. Should you do the rice too soon, just keep it in the warm cooking pot with the lid on and a sheet of paper kitchen towel laid loosely on top of the rice.

We are ready to finish the curry. Firstly, test that the meat and vegetables are cooked to your taste, the pork should be tender and the veg should be cooked soft but not falling apart. Then, add the cubes of curry paste, half a packet is about right for this one. Take a big spoon and start stirring the stew to dissolve the curry paste, the stew should start thickening quite dramatically.

Keep the heat low and keep stirring for a good 5 minutes. You really need to dissolve those curry cubes and allow all the flour that they contain to cook through. Turn off the heat, cover the pot and let the stew rest for around 10 minutes. Finish preparing the rice and anything else that you are having.

It's curry time! Dish it up on a plate and enjoy! Itadakimasu!

The curry-in-a-box flavor that Yagura reminds you of is, actually, the quintessential curry flavor. Very few home cooks in Japan, and even perhaps relatively few restaurant cooks, have EVER made curry from scratch. The taste of curry and the process of making it have been become standardized. Consequently, there's very little bad curry and, perhaps, very little exquisite curry either. Homemade Japanese curry will not, like homemade Thai or Indian curries, likely yield exciting fresh results. Japanese curry is simple, delicious comfort food.

In fact, just yesterday, after making curry at home by mixing two brands of boxed curry - one spicy, one sweet, - I commented that the curry reminded me of children's food (by no means an insult). Not merely the taste and texture, but the sheer delight of eating it with all its attendant associations. My Japanese friend ventured to say that 90% of all Japanese children, if asked, would probably say that curry is their favorite food.

I guess we have different takes on curry, but let's say it's a matter of perspective. Certainly, Japanese curry has become the most standard of comfort foods in the past couple generations, and that's great. I'm sure the big curry manufacturers couldn't be happier to have created a standardized product that 95% of the population will use instead of making from scratch. But the way I see it, Japanese curry IS a complex food that has been made needlessly simple. Its development did span half the world to reach Japan, via Europe (using mostly French cooking techniques) from the original concept of Indian curry. But now there's a heavy association of it being children's food.

You’d think the Japanese would have come by their curry via India. Nosiree, Bob-san. Our mates the Brits took it from India and sailed with it to Japan in the late nineteenth century. In an early show of the ingenuity they would later gain renown for, the Japanese soon developed make-at-home versions of the sauce. When cooked, these curry mixes look more like medium- to dark-brown gravy and are a touch thicker and sweeter than their Indian cousins. Common brands found in the U.S. include S&B and House.

Japanese curry sauce is served over rice, no surprise, and in this configuration is known as karei raisu,</em> or “curry rice”—as you may have guessed. As you may not have guessed, it is eaten with a spoon, not chopsticks.

Start with a box of curry sauce mix (left). S&B is the most widely sold brand and is available in mild, medium, and hot; it can often be found in the "ethnic" aisle of large supermarkets as well as at Asian grocers. House Foods has several styles—Vermont, Java, Kokumaro, among them—also available in mild, medium, and hot varieties. For a more authentic version, I guess you’d have to follow the instructions on the box. I’m going to detail how my Midwestern-Japanese fusion version is made.
Not only is Japanese-style curry delicious and easy to make, it’s perfect for feeding a lot of people—or for getting several meals out of one cooking session; it can be easily frozen in individual portions for reheating later. To make it, you need carrots, potatoes, and onions.

If you disagree, it is only because you have not eaten it. You might be intimately familiar with the Indian or Thai varieties, in all their festive colors and mouth-stabbing spiciness. You might have, in a fit of curiosity, actually skipped the chicken teriyaki and tried a plate of curry in a Japanese restaurant. Perhaps it was even topped with the traditional breaded pork.

But unless you've eaten curry in one of Japan's curry-only lunch joints, one of which is never more than five minutes from anywhere else in the country, you have never tasted of this most holy of foodstuffs. This is not travel snobbery. It's just that none of the Japanese curry chains have opened locations in the continental United States.

Until now. Last May, Go Go Curry opened its first U.S. branch, a tiny shop in midtown Manhattan, right around the corner from Times Square. Since then, they've been serving up the real deal -- honest-to-God Japanese curry, served the same way Tokyo's salarymen scarf it up on their half-hour lunch breaks. It is head and shoulders above any Japanese curry I've ever had in America.

And as someone with a crippling addiction, I would know.

I love Japan's curry in the same way that a heroin addict loves shooting up. The only significant difference between the two is that eventually, if you stop doing heroin long enough, you are no longer addicted to it. Japanese curry addiction does not leave you even when you move back home. You just spend your days wishing you could eat it again, saving your money so you can fly back to Tokyo and eat more.

You never forget that first amazing high. For me it was in the school cafeterias at Kanazawa University, where I discovered that what most of the Japanese students were lining up for every day was not teriyaki or sushi rolls but curry: A brown glop that looked for all the world like severely burnt chowder, ladled obscenely over a giant plate of rice. As a final fuck-you to the arteries, it was often topped with whatever fried thing the cafeteria had whipped up that day: pork katsu, usually, but sometimes chicken. Sometimes a chicken-fried steak, to the extent that Japanese lunch ladies were capable of making one.

I don't know who first convinced me to try it, but: bliss! This was absolutely nothing like Indian curry. It was a little spicy, sure, but mostly it was just sweet and savory -- a rich, creamy flavor full of ingredients that were mostly unknown to me but almost certainly included crack cocaine. It blended perfectly with the rest of the ingredients: The pure flavor of the sticky rice, the crunchy breading and devil-may-care fat of the pork.

It was also, as near as I could figure, the only Japanese food meant to be shoveled into the mouth with a spoon.

Curry is is one of the most popular dishes in Japan. It is commonly served in three main forms: curry rice, karē /en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Udon" title="Udon">udon (thick <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noodles" class="mw-redirect" title="Noodles">noodles) and karē-pan (href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bread" title="Bread">bread). It is usually thicker, sweeter and milder than its Indian equivalent.

A wide variety of vegetables and meats are used to make Japanese curry. The basic vegetables are onions, carrots, and potatoes. Sometimes grated apples or honey are added for additional sweetness. For the meat, pork, beef and chicken are the most popular, in order of decreasing popularity. Katsu-karē is a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tonkatsu" title="Tonkatsu">breaded deep-fried pork cutlet with curry sauce.

Curry was introduced to Japan during the Meiji era (1869 - 1913), at a time when India was under the administration of the British. The dish became popular and available for purchase in supermarkets and restaurants in the late nineteen sixties.

One reason why Japanese curry is so popular in Japan is that it is very easy to make compared to many other Japanese dishes. It can be made from a ready-made curry sauce mix, or roux (カレールー), in under an hour. Mixes come in the form of a block and can be found in the West in local supermarkets which have a Japanese section, or in Japanese or Oriental food stores. The most common brand sold in the United States is Golden Curry, made by S&B Foods Inc. However there is a great variety of other brands of curry sauce available in Japan.

Aside from sauce mix blocks, Japanese curry is also sold in powder form, which can be turned into curry gravy by adding water.

Japanese curry rice is made from rice, curry sauce, vegetables and meat. The process of making the curry starts with sautéeing chopped vegetables and meat in oil, margarine, or butter. Once the meat has been browned and the onions softened, water is added and brought to a boil. The ingredients are then simmered under low heat for about 20 minutes (as per instructions on roux boxes), or much longer if more tender meat is desired or if stewing meat is being used (however, cooking time can be quartered through the use of a pressure cooker). Finally, the curry mix is added, stirring frequently for about 5 minutes to dissolve. The curry is then ready to be served.