best malaysian chicken curry, emir's style.
Hello peeps!
Today, Emir want to share with you my way of cooking chicken curry. Curry is my favourite dish. Many spices in curry make my tastebud dancing a jig. There are many ways of cooking curry. My mom side which is Johorean have their own ways of cooking curry. My mom normally put a little bit of biriyani powder - one of Johorean homemade biryani spice homemade at Larkin Jaya.
PREP TIME: 15 minutes | COOK TIME: 30 minutes | TOTAL TIME: 45 minutes
A little background of chicken curry in Malaysia; Walk into any curry house in Malaysia and you’ll often find a sea of curries on display. There are chunky, hunky beef rendangs, turmeric-tinged hunks of ayam masak lemak (literally “fat-cooked chicken”), crimson fish curries that make your brows sweat just from staring at them for too long, and just in case you were missing your greens, wilted spinach leaves curled up in coconut milk curry.
But for all the traffic-light hues and variations they come in, there is one common feature that Malaysian curries share—they’re flecked with specks of oil, gleaming on their surface, separated from the bulk of the curry below. Because to make a great Malaysian curry, you have to saute until split the oil and curry spices.
In much of Mat Salleh cooking, a split or broken sauce is a sign of a dish gone bad, or at best, a lack of technique. Split mayonnaises, chocolate ganache, and textures resembling curdled milk are vilified. Even a trace amount of fat pooled on top of a soup would incite a revolt. French cuisine, especially, abhors broken sauces. Just watch Disney Pixar’s Ratatouille.
But now that I’m living in Malaysia, broken sauces are everywhere. Our curries, rendangs, and gulais (the collective Malay word for stews) are never completely smooth. Whether it’s in an opulent crab dish, a chile-forward fish head stew, or a classic Malaysian chicken curry, splitting the sauce is such a key step in the process that we even have a culinary term for it: pecah minyak, literally meaning “breaking the oil.”
And it isn’t just Malaysian curries. In the curry-crazed cuisine of Thailand, tom yams and massaman curries all have beads of oil shimmering salaciously on the surface. Goan fish curries and lamb rogan joshes of India have a slick layer of oil you have to plunge through to get to the sauce itself. And since Indonesia and Singapore share a similar cuisine to Malaysia, the process of pecah minyak is very much in their culinary genes, too.
Yes, there are curries out there that are tempered with cream or coconut milk, helping it emulsify into a smoother, more homogenous sauce, but even those start split.
To understand why one must understand how curries are made. Most start with a blend of aromatics, usually a ground-up paste of chiles, garlic, onions, cumin, and a blend of spices specific to each curry. This paste is first sweated in a bit of oil, releasing the liquid contained within the ingredients. Then, about 10 minutes in, as the ratio of liquid to oil decreases, the paste will naturally separate from the oil it was fried in, giving it a curdled look. One sign you can smell immediately is that the aromas peaking up during this time.
The reason for this is two-fold: For one, this flavours the oil, lending a fragrance that wafts up as it cooks into the meat later on. But more than anything, a broken sauce signifies that the flavour of the curry paste has been drawn out and intensified to its peak; this is when the paste has the most panache, the most flavour. Fry it any longer and it’ll start to burn. Control your fire.
So yes, while splitting a sauce might seem like a counterintuitive step in cooking—and possibly an unfamiliar one to those who’ve never ventured into curry territory—it certainly makes for better, bolder dishes. And without it, curries wouldn’t be able to reach their headiest heights.
To get you started, here’s a gentle primer into the world of pecah minyak, in the form of my simple Malaysian chicken curry. It’s a dish that doesn’t ask much of you—other than to break the sauce in the beginning. It’s the first curry I learned from my mom, and the one I cook most often whenever I’m craving a bowl of Malaysian comfort.
ingredients.
6 shallots
3 garlic cloves
1 (2-inch) piece ginger
3 tablespoons dried red chiles paste
5 tablespoons oil
5 tablespoons Malaysian curry powder (usually labelled "meat curry powder"), I use Baba's or Adabi’s
2 tablespoons chilli powder, plus more if want spicy
2 chicken cube stocks, I use Knorr.
2 teaspoons salt
1 cinnamon stick
4 cardamom seeds
5 cloves
2 star anise
10 + 15 curry leaves
2 1/2 pounds bone-in chicken thighs and drumsticks
2 cups water, or enough to cover chicken
3 medium potatoes, peeled and quartered
1 1/2 cups tamarind juice
2 tablespoons ghee
3 tablespoons oil
1 cup of coconut milk (you can use fresh milk if you like)
instructions.
step 1
In a food processor, blend the shallots, garlic, ginger, and 15 curry leaves until they form a smooth paste. (Alternatively, you can take the more traditional, and more laborious, route—pounding it with a mortar and pestle until smooth. - I heard that it will give more flavours, never try it before. You may try it.)
step 2
Heat up the ghee and oil in a deep pot or wok set over medium heat. Saute the “4 sekawan” namely; cinnamon stick, cardamom seeds, cloves, star anise and 10 curry leaves until fragrant.
step 3
Add the blended paste and stir-fry until it turns fragrant and intensifies in color. This should take 6 to 8 minutes.
step 4
Add the dried chilli paste and chilli powder and stir fry it until the smoke of fry chilli makes you cough.
step 5
Then, add the curry powder, chilli powder, frying for another 3 to 5 minutes under medium heat- until the spice paste starts to glisten and split and you can see an oily film separate from the paste itself. This is the “pecah minyak” stage. (If your paste is cooking too quickly and starts to burn, add a teaspoon or two). Remember controlling the heat and continuous stir is the main keys here.
step 6
When the spice paste has reached the “pecah minyak” stage, add chicken. Mix and continue frying for 3 to 5 minutes, until the chicken is evenly coated in the curry paste and noticeably shrink a bit. Then, pour water and tamarind juice into the pot until the pieces of chicken are just covered. Cover the pot with a lid and let it simmer for 10 minutes.
step 7
Add the potatoes and chicken stock cubes. Simmer with low heat for another 25 to 30 minutes, until both the chicken and potatoes are cooked through.
step 8
Finally, pour in the coconut milk / milk. Give it a quick stir, and let the curry simmer for another 5 to 8 minutes. Taste the curry, adding more salt at this stage if necessary.
Emir’s tip! for the curry more kicks!
Stir fry the spice in control heat. You cannot fry it with very high heat else it will burn the spices.
To make the curry more thick, add some more the curry powder - another 2 tablespoons do the magic.
I normally use fresh milk instead of coconut milk - control your cholestrol level perhaps?
The moment you add in chicken, set the heat to low and let the chicken marinate well with the curry spices until the chicken half cooks.
Hope you will try this recipe!
All the best! Send me a message on how is it going.
Good luck,
EMIR xx
