When your spice curry turns out watery

A friend who made spice curry for the first time with a SPICE PACK told me: “It tasted good, but it came out a little watery...”

Looking at the photos taken while cooking, one thing in the picture caught my eye.

Could it be the onions?

The single most important point in spice curry is how you cook the onions, and it is no exaggeration to say that the way you cook them changes the flavour you arrive at.

In my own cooking I work from

• 5 minutes
• 10 minutes
• 15 minutes

as three rough patterns.
(To my eye, the photo above looks like onions cooked for a little over five minutes.)

As a rule, the longer you cook them, the sweeter the onions become and the richer the flavour. But depending on the ingredients you are combining and the direction you are aiming for, five minutes is sometimes the right answer.

The wateriness this time most likely came down, in large part, to the onion cooking time.

So I ran a test.

• Onions cooked for 15 minutes
• Onions cooked for 5 minutes

Everything apart from the onion cooking time kept the same.

The result was as expected.

Cooking the onions comes early in the process. Everything else is layered on top of it, so if the onions are still holding a lot of water, the ingredients that follow do not cook through as well, and that accumulation is what leads to a watery curry.

Of course, a watery curry is not wrong in itself.

This is about wanting a rich finish and getting a watery one instead.

There are spice curry recipes where a looser consistency is exactly what makes them good, but for this basic chicken curry I would say ten minutes is the minimum if you want the whole dish in balance.

Now then, let's enjoy some good spice cooking again today.