So that the meat is tender I’m letting the meat simmer for 4 hours. I put ingredients like onion, ginger, mushrooms during that period. But potatoes I only put them near the end. I also sometimes add apples or pears for some sweet ingredients. Would it be best to put the apple at the same time as the potatoes or is ok to put them before?
If you want them to carmelize and begin to break down, add them before any liquid. If you want them fresh and crispy, add them off the heat at the very end or even as garnish.
Haven’t thought about caramelizing the apples. Will probably experiment with that. When slow cooking I do caramelize the onions on a pad next to the pot.
This time I added them with the potatos, the last 15 minutes. So that they are soft but not too mushy
Sounds yummy!
I think it depends on how mushy you want them to be - you could add them with the mushrooms if you don’t mind them cooking down, but if you want them firmer you might adjust.
That said, I’m no authority on how to cook curry and don’t have any sense of the “right” way to approach this according to a particular food culture.
I would say It depends a lot of the type of apple and the final texture you want. Something like a granny smith or a honey crisp will hold their texture better. Something like a red delicious or mcIntosh will break down quickly. If you want the apples to hold texture add them towards the end and preference the former, if you want them to totally break down the later will be better.
I don’t think them breaking down would be very good though as they will not create a smooth sauce that I at least associate with a Japanese curry.
Is this like a Japanese style curry? I’d probably put them in early so the meat has a chance to pick up the sugar, assuming you want them to break down fully into the sauce, which is the way I would usually do it. I usually don’t cook a curry with meat that takes that long to cook, so I grate the apples.
Yeah, it is Japanese style curry. Roughly following the steps in from Just One Cookbokookbook. Normally we just use chicken for a quick (~15 minutes) curry. But occasionally I grab a fatty (and tough to save $$$) peace of meat and slow cook for 4-6 hours.
One difference from the above recipe is that I put the [golden] curry blocks at the end to avoid burning the spices.
Yah, they’re supposed to go in at the very end, if not off the heat outright, there are a lot of ingredients in them that are heat sensitive and will break down or cook off with long exposure to heat.
