Spice Up Your Kitchen with this Singapore Chicken Curry Recipe!

This is truly a great representation of the vibrant food culture of Singapore using a blend of spices and herbs. It's going to be a great hit for your taste buds. This is my version of Singapore chicken curry. Hi, it's Che here at School of Wok and welcome back to another episode of Wok Wednesday. So today for the Singapore chicken curry, we are going to be making the curry paste first. So what I did earlier was cut up a red onion and then followed by some garlic, ginger and some shallots. And then just finally added in my pre-soaked and de-seeded red chillies. And in to the blender I also added just a tiny little bit of that soaking liquid from the chillies and then just kind of gave it a really good blitz. Et voila, you have your curry paste made up in about sort of a few minutes which is a lot faster than having to sort of pound it by hand in a mortar. Although if you wanted to do that, good for you. So once that paste is out of the way, we are going to be cutting a few things. Just some potatoes and some carrots and also just prepping some lemongrass. So off we go. I'm just going to start by peeling the vegetables. So with our carrots, we're just going to do a rolling bias cut and all that is is simply you're just going to cut down on the diagonal and then simply roll the carrot just slightly towards me and then do another cut. And then just carry on from there. It's a really nice way of presentation because it just kind of means you're not making little sort of boring round cuts as it were. And with this really big potato, we're just going to cut them into quite big chunks. Again, just anything angular is really quite nice in terms of presentation. We're not looking to make them too small because this is kind of a rustic dish and also conversely, you don't want them too big because that's just going to take a little bit longer to cook. So anything that's going to take about 20 minutes or so to cook, that's kind of the size that you are looking for. And finally, also with the lemongrass, we're just going to just take the bottom bit off. First of all, it's quite hard. And what we're going to do is we're just going to use the bottom half of the lemongrass. So we're just going to get rid of the tops here and then we're just going to simply bash down slightly just so that it kind of opens up a little bit. That's our lemongrass prepped. Next up, we're just going to heat our wok and let's get cooking. Right, so to get our curry going, we're just going to heat up our little wok here. Make sure you've got enough space in your wok. You could do it in a pot, obviously. I just prefer a wok because it's a little bit easier for me. I'm just going to get about 100 mils of just vegetable oil in there. It may feel like it's quite a lot. Don't worry. You can always skim off the fat later on at the end if you don't fancy it too oily. So plenty of oil in there. Give it a bit of a swivel. And then we're just going to go in with the curry paste. And obviously, you want the oil to be nice and hot. So then we're going to fry it off. And super important at this point, you want to be frying off your paste really well so it becomes nice and dry. Also, the paste is just going to darken ever so slightly. So give it a good few minutes. Be patient with it. Obviously, go with a medium heat if you can. Not too hot because otherwise the paste is going to burn. So you just have to kind of be here, monitor it, make sure it's doing okay. Great. So the paste is now looking much drier, which is kind of what we want. Also much darker in colour. So we are now just going to add in a few other aromatics. So I've got here some curry leaves. Okay. So for your curry leaves, you can just kind of pick them off of the stalks. They just add a really nice aroma. Just really nice and pungent and quite astringent as well. If you can't get hold of it, just don't use it. It's absolutely fine to leave them out. But I'm just going to go in with about, say, 12 to 15 leaves. And also going to get a little bit of turmeric in there. So just ground turmeric for a nice bit of that golden colour. There we go. And also, to start the show, I've got some meat powder here. So meat curry powder. That goes really well with any kind of curry that you want to make. You can use it also for goat, beef curry. But this has got really kind of the soul of the curry in it. Nice golden colour as well because they also have some turmeric in there. So we're just going to fry over the paste with all of the dry spices. It smells really good already. Next up, our chicken can go in. We're using bone-in chicken thighs and drumsticks today. So give it a really good mix. Make sure it's all well coated in that curry paste. Don't forget also, you've got some lemongrass to go in. So these lemongrass can just go in like that, big chunks. Also, we're going to get some liquid in there. Obviously, you've got your coconut milk. That's your typical Southeast Asian curry fat going in. And just to make it slightly runnier, we're just going to also go in with some evaporated milk. And we're just going to give that a really good stir. Make sure everything is well combined. And then we're just going to let that simmer away. For a good 10 to 15 minutes or so. Right, so the chicken's had about five minutes. Do know that the curry paste can dry out a little bit. So you just may need to top up with a little bit of water sometimes. Just kind of make sure the chicken's being covered by enough liquid. Just going to go in now with some of the potatoes, or with the potatoes rather, as well as the carrots. Okay, so they'll need about a good sort of 15 minutes, 15 to 20 minutes to kind of cook and soften. I'm just going to also season up now. I've got a little bit of magic powder, i.e. chicken bouillon powder. That's completely optional, but I just think that it tastes really, really nice with it. So that's chicken powder. And also just going to go in with a tiny bit of sugar. And obviously, just to balance that sugar, we're also going to get a tiny bit of a pinch of salt in there. And just kind of give it a really good stir, and then just kind of every now and then just check that the bottom's not stuck. Don't want anything to burn, obviously. So just be really, really aware, because you've got quite a lot of these spices in there. They tend to kind of settle down to the bottom of the wok or to the pot. So just make sure every now and then, just check, make sure that your curry's doing okay. This curry is obviously not something that you can just kind of throw everything in and walk away. You do not do that. You just need to take care of it like a little baby. Okay, just baby your curry and it'll be fantastic. All right, so just kind of let that simmer away. So it's been about half an hour now, bubbling away really nicely. So we're just going to boil everything up and we'll see what we get. Make sure you get plenty of potatoes. The lemongrass and the curry leaves can absolutely stay in there. They look quite nice as part of the dish, because we're not really having any kind of other garnish on top. When you do make this dish, you just want to make sure that you get quite a sort of a runny kind of consistency to your curry. Make sure it's not too thick and also just keep topping up with water or stock if you find that it's going a little bit dry. This is just a fantastic curry for either cold or hot weather. It's just savoury, it's sweet and spicy and much better than any kind of curry recipe from New York Times, I dare say. Anyway, let's not go there. There was a whole controversy over it. We're over it now. Just enjoy this curry. It's much better than the drain curry that they had. Don't forget to like and comment and subscribe if you know what I'm talking about. You know what I'm talking about, hey.