Rethinking the chicken skin in chicken curry

There are plenty of occasions to use chicken in a spice curry. It is lean, it costs less than other meats, and above all it tastes good. But every time, there is one small thing on my mind.

It is the skin.

Chicken skin is delicious, but if you follow, say, the steps of the basic chicken curry made with SN1, then unless you cook it hard enough to put real colour on the skin itself, it ends up with a flabby texture.

There are of course people who love exactly that, but I think there are plenty who find it hard going.

So this time I would like to share the approaches I recommend for enjoying the chicken skin when you make a chicken spice curry.

Approach 1: sear the chicken before it goes into the pot

This is one I use often. In the recipe above, the chicken goes in once the onions are done and is cooked from there.

The difference here is that you add chicken that has already been cooked through in a separate frying pan.

Take the chicken, cut into chunks, and work in

• about 1 tsp of the powder from the Spice Curry spice pack
• nam pla (Thai fish sauce)

then fry it in an oiled pan and join it with the rest of the ingredients in the pot. That way you always get chicken that is properly seared right through to the skin, and the texture when you eat it is completely different. It is well seasoned to begin with, so the chicken itself tastes better.

The points to watch:

• start cooking it skin side down
• tip the juices that come out of the chicken into the pot as well

That is all. It is an extra step, but the flavour is on a different level, so do give it a try.

Approach 2: take the skin off

The approach of simply using the meat alone. Without the fat that renders from the skin, the flavour comes out lighter and leaner, and the curry itself has fewer calories.

The skin you removed can go into a snack. I often turn it into torikawa ponzu, chicken skin with ponzu, a citrus-and-soy sauce. Crisp chicken skin goes perfectly with a beer.

[Chicken skin with ponzu] Cut the chicken skin into pieces of the size you like and cook it slowly in a frying pan over low heat. Shallow-fry it until crisp in the fat that renders out of the skin. Arrange sliced onion in a bowl and put the skin from step 1 on top. Pour over ponzu (a citrus-soy sauce), scatter green onion over it, and it is done.

Incidentally, there is also an advanced move in which the fat left behind after crisping the skin, torisabura or chicken fat, is poured over the spice curry at the very end as a tempering.

If you love chicken spice curry but have felt uneasy about the skin, give these a try.