Masterclass: Homestyle Mughlai Curry

A soul filling flavor bomb

You are in for a special treat today

If you’ve been here for a while you know how I much I love curry. 🍛 All sorts of curry around the world, but especially India 🇮🇳 curries. If you’re new here… highly recommend going back to my intro Curry post at some point (the recipe in that post is also delicious and very different from today).

Today is a recipe that’s influenced from a particular time-period in Indian history.

The occupation of Northern India by the Mughals, which lasted over 400 years.

I’m not going to go into a long history lesson, although it is fascinating to learn about the evolution of food cultures.

Indian food culture and evolution can be extremely confusing from the outside with some overlap in regional tendencies etc. So keeping this straight forward with some generalizations.

Mughlai curries are known for using lots of aromatic spices. The gravies are on the thicker side of the spectrum usually enriched by fat (yogurt, etc) which gives them a creamy and rich mouthfeel.

You’ve seen the curries with a gravy that you can pour off or more like a soup… that’s not Mughlai style. These curries are thick almost like a puree that stands up on a spoon at times.

Traditionally Mughlai curries are cooked for a long time, developing wonderful flavor and use no base gravy.

The spice level can vary from mild to, say, medium hot.

One Mughlai curry you’re probably familiar with is Korma. A popular version is chicken korma which is a mild, aromatic gravy that is thickened with dairy and ground nuts (usually).

We can visit that preparation later but today I wanted to share a fabulous Mughlai curry that is thick, unctuous, full of warming spices and aromatics, accented by a good amount of heat.

You can dial the heat down some, but believe it or not the heat actually brings out more of the warming spices and flavors that we will be developing

There’s (3) important phases to this curry which I will break down and when you are finished, you won’t want to leave home for curry again 🙌

Lamb is perfect for this but can use beef or goat.

Without further ado… curry magic… Homestyle Mughlai Lamb Curry!