In this post we’re entering into the world of curry with a North Indian style of chicken curry made by Vahchef!

If you grew up on a diet of meat and potatoes like us, then you’re probably a little scared to try ethnic foods. Foreign ingredients, new tastes, and spice level, are often reasons why we choose to eat foods we know and love. But the world of food is vast — and we would all be idiots to stick with what we’re comfortable with. We’re here to help you take the leap into ethnic foods starting with one of our favorites — curry! (Don’t worry, you won’t need to buy stock in Pepto-Bismol.)

Before we go much further, it's worth noting that there are many different types of curries — Indian, Thai, Japanese, etc, with many regional variants. Making a post cataloging the different types of curries would be a massive undertaking. So we’re keeping things simple by replicating a North Indian chicken curry, which means that our curry sauce is going to be tomato based. For reasons that will become obvious later, this isn’t an authentic curry, but rather, a starting point for the beginner cook! Here is what you’ll need:

Easy Indian Curry Recipe

Ingredients:

2 cups diced red onion

2 cups finely chopped tomato

3 tbsp curry powder

½ tbsp ginger paste

½ tbsp garlic paste

¼ cup vegetable oil (or enough to ensure onions are covered)

⅛ cup water

2 chicken breasts, cubed

Optional Spices:

½ tbsp chili powder

¼ tbsp red chili flakes

Instructions:

Before you get cooking, make sure that all of your ingredients are prepped and ready to go! This dish can cook quite quickly, so having all of the ingredients ready beforehand is going to help you out in the long run. Finely dicing the onion and tomato should be a straightforward task. (Unless you’re Trevor and you slice open your hand taking the knife out of the plastic cover.)

If you want to add in the optional chili powder and red chili flakes, make sure to combine them with the 3 tablespoons of curry powder in a separate bowl so everything is homogeneous.

For this recipe, we opted to use fresh ginger and garlic for the ginger-garlic paste. To prepare the ginger paste, peel and finely grate a knob of ginger until you have ½ a tablespoon of ginger paste. For the garlic paste, you can do the same, or, you can do that fancy thing with a chef knife.

🍛 Mediocre Tip: If you don’t want to use the fresh stuff, most grocery stores will sell ginger and garlic paste in a jar. These are perfectly fine substitutes and have the added bonus of keeping for a long time in the fridge.

Lastly, cut the chicken into 1 inch cubes. Don’t worry too much about getting the dimensions perfect. Just give them a rough chop into bite sized pieces.

🍛 Mediocre Tip: If you’re not confident with your meat-cutting knife skills, use scissors to easily cut your chicken into even sized pieces!