I'm a big curry aficionado and am trying to cook curries that both taste good and require minimal preparation during the week. I like to make both vegetarian (usually, green/red lentils, fresh) and chicken-based curries.
For that reason, I'm starting by blending the masalas, tomatoes, onions, etc, in a blender, frying, adding the rest of the ingredients, adding water, and then reducing until finished.
I've noticed that both the tubers and the lentils cook very slowly using this method.
If the blended mix is particularly thick (e.g., it includes the tubers themselves or ground nuts), I've found that it hardly cooks at all.
I've figured that the problem has to do with the viscosity of the cooking medium (starches obviously make it the most 'gluggy') and feel that things would work much better if I cooked the lentils in water and then transferred, once cooked, into the sauce, but the recipes I've read all use the all-in-one method that I'm following without much success.
In addition to not cooking, things seem to require very frequent stirring and sticking is a big problem.
Is there any solution to this?
Best Answer
This answer presumes your worry is that by not putting in the pulses/tubers from the beginning, you're actually not ending up with the "correct" result.
My experience with recipes (even from reputable sources) with regard to slow cooked, stewy dishes, with ingredients that take time before they're done, is that they're either short on time, or short on liquids. Either that, or I'm bad with measuring, use ingredients of lesser quality, or suck at cooking (most of the time I suspect the latter two are the guilty parties).
But most likely (and here's the good part), the pulses/tubers are there from the beginning to act not only as a nutritional component, but also serve a dual function as thickener. They're most definitely (IMHO) not there from the beginning to impart flavor to the curry.
So one of the solutions you've already found yourself: Cook the pulses/tubers separately, and add them in the end. The curry will not suffer any loss in flavor. If it's to thin, either squish some of pulses so the starches can thicken it, or reduce a bit longer.
Second solution: Start out with more liquid than the recipe prescribes, and cook/reduce longer, until the desired thickness has been achieved.