Customer Reviews

Best-Ever Curry Cookbook

5 star:		(16)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

I bought this book on a whim and we use it over and over. It is
easily read, followed and thus you pull it out when you feel like a curry and its condiments. This is a book you can use when you cook during the week as well as on weekends. That is a
treat. I collect cookbooks, have taken lessons in India/Thailand and the books and recipes I returned with were not user friendly because of ingredients or technique. This one is. Kudos to the author for allowing us to share the joy of these culinary adventures.

I don't keep many cookbooks - I tend to use a lot of online recipe sites and then alter the recipes to meet my needs. However, this cookbook holds pride of place on my shelf and always will. I estimate that I've made about half of the recipes from the regional Indian sections, and one or two from the smaller sections in the book on other southeast Asian cuisines, and everything I've made has come out in the 4 or 5 star range on my personal measure of taste. The recipes are incredibly detailed and include numerous helpful photographs. Many of the more complicated recipes do include long lists of ingredients, but I've never had difficulty following the recipe. Most of the main course dishes include a recommendation for what rice or vegetable to serve on the side, which is helpful when planning a meal.

Each section is prefaced by pages describing the traditional ingredients of a region, and a bit about how they are usually prepared. The Indian cuisine section is divided by cultural region, and there are sections on Thai and other southeast Asian curries as well. Most of the recipes in this book focus on main courses, but there are also many rice, vegetable, appetizer, snack and even condiment recipes as well. Truly a worthwhile book if you're interested in Indian cuisine and curries in particular. The green chicken curry and cashew chicken are particular favs.

I am currently purchasing a third copy of this book, because my friends and relatives tried multiple recipes from it and they really wanted to have the same book as me.
I cooked about half of the recipes from this book and I recommend it for any curry lover. It explains a lot, gives choices and advices, everything is precisely measured (for all ingredients there are measurments in g/oz/cups).
I love the introduction with cultural facts and descriptions.

Summary: buy it and you'll enjoy it!

Wow. This book kind of makes my head spin, but I'm not complaining.

If you're the kind of cook who gets frustrated with books that require exotic ingredients, stop now and don't bother buying this and then writing a bad review. It's curry. It's going to require exotic ingredients. You can't do it with canned mushroom soup and a standard American spice cabinet. Most of us--myself included--don't keep galangal, lemongrass, half a dozen kinds of curry mix, etc. on hand and will need to do a little advance planning.

It's totally worth it.

My one little complaint is that one of my all-time favorite foods, ever, is the yellow chicken or tofu curry I get at local Thai restaurants, and I'm not sure that it's in here. It's possible that it's an American adaptation. The red curry, though, looks close, and there are so many other wonderful recipes in here that I don't care if I have to Google one or two.

Even better, the book includes recipes for the breads, seasoned rice, some salads and condiments, etc. that go with the main dishes, and there are lots of very tasty meatless (and often dairy-less) meals.

This book contains more of our favorite recipes than any other cookbook in our house. I especially recommend the mushroom, pea, cheese curry (friends are constantly asking for this recipe); the Burmese pork curry; the Vietnamese chicken with lemongrass and orange zest; and the beef curry with peanut sauce, which we just made yet again tonight.

You'll probably need to go to an Asian market to pick up some of the key ingredients that give these recipes their wonderful flavor -- the Burmese pork curry recipe includes fish sauce, shrimp paste and tamarind, for example -- but most Asian markets should definitely carry the items called for, and your efforts will be richly rewarded.

One quirk: when a recipe calls for adding water, the book seems to always call for nearly twice as much as makes sense to me, so I usually reduce the amount accordingly.

Don't let the word curry dissuade you from purchasing this book. It goes way beyond curry and way beyond Indian cuisine. Mridual Baljekar really knows how to pull a cookbook together. The ingredients are listed in the order of use. The directions are simple to follow - clearly stated -- nice techniques. Great pictures of EVERY dish. The recipes cover so many different types of dishes. From curries, soups, main dishes to rice, condiments and includes meat, seafood and meatless. It is one of my favorite cookbooks - I use it at least once a week. I actually have purchased multiple copies to give away as gifts to those that have tasted the dishes at my parties. I wouldn't hesitate to purchase other cookbooks from Mridula Baljekar! Asian

Never mind the reviewer who said that this book is poorly organized. Indian cookery revolves around pastes and mixtures of spices and rather than repeating these procedures time and time again in every recipe they are separated out into a great section that deals with the spices and sauces common to many Indian foods. This is a great primer for people unfamiliar with cooking Indian foods and a broad and useful book for those of us experienced but maybe getting bored of cooking the same old foods time and time again.

My mother, nearly sixty years old, Indian and cooking curries her entire adult life spent hours pouring over this book and so I bought my second copy as a present for her and she loves it.

My failure to give this five stars is only because I own an old Penguin Paperback called Indian Cookery (Dharmamjit Singh) which I regard to be the holy grail of Indian Cookery books. Indian Cookery (Penguin handbooks).

I think another reviewer called the book disorganized, but I disagree. At least when it comes to the recipes I found that the lists of ingredients were very well organized and placed in order of their usage during cooking. The pictures were top quality and very well chosen to illustrate precisely what was called for in the recipe. For example, using the handle of a wooden spoon to create a hole through the layer of rice in one of the biryani dishes might have been confusing for me (how large to make the hole, then are the next ingredients layered over the hole or around the top of the rice?), but the picture showed exactly what was meant.

Some of the background material on the regions and the equipment might have been included in a way that was somewhat less organized. A first section in the book shows a bunch of different spices and other staples of Indian cookery, and then another section seems to do something very similar near the end of the book, and then more recipes follow. I noticed that some of these descriptive sections were identical to those used in a much larger Indian cookbook, and I imagine the auhtors/copyright holders decided to re-use them to give some heft to this smaller, more direct "Best-ever Curry Cookbook." But I had no problem with it, and enjoyed the layout and design very much.

In summary, the recipes, most importantly, come out incredibly delicious. The pictures are beautiful and very helpful. And the instructions are well written and easy to follow, and courteous enough to include temperatures, names, and amounts for North American as well as European based cooks.

I also appreciate the large size, and that the book opens nice and flat onto the counter. I real find.

I have had this book for years and recently ordered it for a friend interested in learning to cook curry. Great book for that

I've tried only two of the recipes from this book -- BEEF BIRYANI and CHICKEN KORMA. They turned out to be extremely delicious dishes.

In BEST-EVER CURRY COOKBOOK, Baljekar has provided a short introduction to each of the recipes. As a beginner, I've enjoyed reading the introductions to dishes. I've been looking for the ethnic/regional origins of some very popular dishes like rogan josh, Hyderabadi lamb korma, chicken dopiaza, chicken jalfrezi, chicken korma, lamb rezala, and so on. As a researcher in Mughlai cuisine, identifying dishes with the 4 regions (north, south, east and west) has been helpful for me to understand.

I wonder if there'll be another new edition of this single-author cookbook.

Dr. M. Solaiman Ali
School of bEngineering
King Abdulaziz University
Jeddah, Saudi Arabia 21589