East Africa and the Islands · Volume 18, The Indian Ocean Islands
Cari poulet
Réunion
An illustration of the dish, not a photograph of it cooked.
- Time
- 50 minutes
- Reviewed
- Not yet reviewed from inside the tradition
- Cooked
- Not yet cooked and reported
The most important technique in the Mascarene half of this volume, and the one Western recipes get wrong by treating it as a curry. A cari is not a curry with a Creole accent. It is a browned aromatic base carrying bloomed turmeric, and its identity is chemical.
As tradition built it
Serves 4. About 50 minutes.
Ingredients
- 1 kg chicken thighs, about 4
- 2 onions, thinly sliced
- 4 cloves garlic, crushed
- 3 cm fresh ginger, grated
- 3 ripe tomatoes, crushed
- 1 tsp turmeric
- 2 sprigs thyme
- 2 tbsp neutral oil
- to taste salt and pepper
Method
- Sear the chicken hard in the oil, 3 to 4 minutes a side, until deeply golden and almost crisp. Do not move it early and do not crowd the pan.
- Add the sliced onions straight into the rendered chicken juices and let them soften.
- Garlic, then ginger, then turmeric. Stir for 1 minute to wake the spice without burning it.
- Crushed tomato and thyme. Season with salt and pepper.
- Simmer 30 to 40 minutes with the lid deliberately ajar, over medium low, until the meat falls off the bone.
Notes
From a Réunionnais source, weighed.
The lid ajar is a reduction instruction, not carelessness. A closed pot returns its condensate and you finish with a watery sauce; the gap lets the sauce concentrate across the whole 30 to 40 minutes.
What a modern chef changes
Fresh rhizome, a quenched bloom, the skin kept crisp, and the sauce finished apart
Rungs 2 and 1
Method
- Use fresh turmeric rhizome, grated, and bloom it properly. Rung 2. Sixty seconds in hot fat gets the curcumin into solution rather than suspension, and fresh rhizome carries the volatile turmerones a catering tub lost a year ago. Then quench immediately with the tomato. Bloom and quench are one movement.
- Take the chicken out after the sear and return it after the base is built. Sear skin side down, remove, build the base in that fat, then return the thighs skin side up so the skin sits proud of the liquid. You get the Rung 1 fond and a skin worth eating, which the traditional method sacrifices.
- Split the finish. At 30 minutes lift the chicken, reduce the sauce hard for 5 minutes on its own, then reunite. This does deliberately what the ajar lid does hopefully.
- Add half the thyme at the start and half in the last two minutes. Thymol and carvacrol need time, but the lighter monoterpenes are gone after 40 minutes.