Quick Chicken and Vegetable Soup Curry, made with SN1

One for a day when you have a little more time than usual. A soup curry with the gentleness of the earth in it.

SPICE CURRY SPICE PACK [Spice Curry Spice Pack] Symphony No.1 (SN1) — a quick chicken and vegetable soup curry.

A spice curry built on a stock drawn slowly and generously from vegetables is gentle in the mouth, and that gentleness settles into you. We wanted to write a recipe with no special seasonings — one that lets you taste the ingredients as they are, as far as possible.

Soup curry 🍅 is said to have started in Sapporo, Hokkaidō. Making the real thing yourself takes time and effort, and it can feel like a dish with a high threshold.

What Inspice would like to offer is something you can make the moment you think “I would like that” in the middle of an ordinary day — something to enjoy together and to call good. So we have deliberately put the word “quick” in the title of this recipe. It still takes a little longer than, say, the basic chicken curry, but it is a soup curry you can genuinely make quickly.

Today there is a bit more time than usual. Today, let us slow down, body and mind, with a quick chicken and vegetable soup curry. That is the scene we had in mind 🌽

Now, to the recipe.

Ingredients (serves 4)

• SN1 / starter spices (the whole-spice sachet): 1 sachet
• SN1 / powder spices (the ground-spice sachet): 1 sachet
• Fresh tomatoes: 2
• Onion: 1
• Green peppers: 2
• Sweet potato: about 200g
• Carrot: 1
• Garlic (grated): 2 tsp (1–2 cloves)
• Ginger (grated): 1 tbsp
• Chicken thigh: 250–300g (1 fillet)
• Sugar: 2 tsp
• Salt: 1 tsp
• Oil: 3 tbsp (use whichever oil you like. For this recipe we recommend olive oil)
• Water: 500ml

The vegetables and quantities above are what we used, but choosing your own vegetables and amounts freely is the real pleasure of a vegetable soup curry. The sweet potato is here because it is autumn as we write this and they are in season. Potato is fine too. Combine whatever is in season, as you like.

Preparation

💡The key to a soup curry is to make a vegetable stock from the trimmings — the skins, stalks and ends you would normally throw away when cutting the vegetables. So do not throw away the trimmings from the preparation. In particular, take care not to discard the brown skin of the onion. It gives the stock a good flavour, and it is rich in quercetin, a polyphenol.

• Grate the garlic, then the ginger, in that order
  
  
• Cut the onion (for this recipe: halve it, halve it again, then slice)
  
  
  
  
  
• Cut the chicken thigh into bite-sized pieces.
  
  
• Peel the other vegetables if they need it, and cut them into whatever size is easy to eat. (Keep the trimmings.)
  
  
  
• Ingredients that take a while to cook, such as sweet potato (or potato) and carrot, can be wrapped in cling film and microwaved for about 3 minutes (at 600W) to save time.
  
  
• Splitting the cardamom in the starter spices (the whole-spice sachet) lengthways with scissors or a knife lifts the aroma
  
  

Making the vegetable stock

Start the vegetable stock before you begin the spice curry. It needs about 15 minutes of simmering, so it works well to get on with the curry while it cooks.

1. Take a pan that holds more than 500ml of water and fry the vegetable trimmings over a medium heat. (Dry-fry them, with no oil.)
   
   
   
2. Fry them until they look like the picture below — the idea is to let them scorch a little.
   
   
   
3. Add 500ml of water to the pan, bring it to the boil, then turn the heat to low and reduce it for about 15 minutes.
   
   
   
4. Strain it through a sieve into a bowl, keeping only the stock.
   
   
   
5. That is the stock done. Ours came to about 300ml. If you end up with less than that, top it up with water.
   

Method

From here it is almost the same as the basic chicken spice curry.

1. Put the “oil: 3 tbsp” into a pan over a low heat, and once the oil is warm, add the starter spices (the whole-spice sachet).
   
   
   
   
2. When you hear the “mustard seeds (the small black ones)” start to crackle, add the grated garlic and fry for about 30 seconds, stirring it through the spices.
   
   
   
   
3. Add the onion, stir it thoroughly through the spices, then turn the heat to high and cook it properly until it is deep golden brown.
   
   
   
   

   How far you cook the onion changes the finished flavour enormously. When a curry comes out watery, or the tomato tastes too sharp, or the depth feels thin, the single biggest cause is moving on to the next step before the onion has turned deep golden brown. For this recipe, always cook the onion for 12–15 minutes, frying it properly until it is deep golden brown. The points to watch are Keep the heat at medium to high Spread the onion evenly across the pan and leave it, then stir; spread it evenly and leave it, then stir; and repeat When you stir and feel the onion catching on the base of the pan, add a splash of water, often (in our experience, about 2 tbsp of water at a time, roughly five times in all) That splash of water carries the savoury depth released by the cooking through the whole pan, and lets you reach deep golden onions without burning them. Letting it catch slightly and then adding water actually draws out more of that depth. It takes a little time and attention, but it is the step that decides the flavour, so give it the time it needs.

   
   
   
4. Once the onion is deep golden brown (below is after about 12 minutes of cooking), turn the heat to medium and add the chicken.
   
   
   
   
5. Once you are sure the chicken is cooked through, add about 2/3 of the powder spices and stir them in, thinking of it as cooking the powder spices themselves.
   
   
6. Keeping the heat at medium, push the ingredients to one side, add the tomatoes, salt: 1 tsp and sugar: 2 tsp, and fry everything while crushing the tomatoes.
   
   
7. Bring it to the boil, then add all of the “vegetable stock”, followed by “all of the other vegetables”.
   
   
8. Once it comes back to the boil, turn the heat to low, put a lid on the pan and simmer for about 20 minutes.
   
   
9. When a skewer goes easily into the carrot and potato, stir in the remaining powder spices and simmer for a further 5 minutes over a low heat.
   
   
10. Taste it at the end and adjust the salt.
    
    

And that is it.

We think it tastes better served with the soup curry in a separate bowl from the rice. (If you have kasoori methi, toast it lightly and scatter it over — it suits this perfectly.)

Buy the spice packs here

Inspice spice curry spice sets contain none of the usual sources of heat — chilli, cayenne pepper or chilli powder — so please add heat to your own taste.