Curry Compendium: Misty Ricardo's Curry Kitchen

Product Information

Now add the pre-cooked chicken / lamb / beef, coriander stalks, lemon juice, the optional coffee granules, and mix well into the sauce. This recipe is from my cookbook CURRY COMPENDIUM , and is also in my second book, INDIAN RESTAURANT CURRY AT HOME VOLUME 1 . Add the chilli powder, mix powder, kasuri methi, salt, and 30ml of base gravy to help the spices cook without burning. Available for most recipes chefs in the making can simply scan the QR code with their smartphone and instantly watch the associated YouTube video. Stir and scrape the caramelisation back into the sauce, but only do this to stop the curry sticking too much and burning.

Overall, Richard Sayce’s (aka Misty Ricardo) Curry Compendium is an excellent book to teach you how to prepare and cook delicious BIR (British Indian Restaurant) style curries in your home kitchen. His long-standing admiration of Indian cuisine from an early age inspired an epic journey of determination, experimentation, creation, and discovery. Salivating, I would sneak downstairs, complaining that I couldn’t sleep, and showing great interest in the foil containers laid out on the table, which had the most amazing magical colours and smells. All the recipes can also easily be adapted by changing the main ingredient (if you didn’t want chicken, you could easily replace it with beef or something else). The book has lots of helpful options and tips for cooking in bulk, including a guide to 'scaling up'.

With just under 100 mouth-watering, easy to follow recipes to try out and delight your tastebuds, any curry lover will want this recipe book on their kitchen bookshelf. I'd recommend this to everyone who is underwhelmed by supermarket alternatives to Indian takeaway food. So, this book was a great find for me especially as I love to learn how to cook a good curry from scratch – Plus, to know what ingredient that has been added and how it was prepared and cooked.

If you like the curries from a UK Curry house and think you can never reproduce these dishes at home, its time to make the purchase of one of these books. To my surprise and delight, each of my books won renowned Gourmand Worldwide Food Awards for Best Self-Published UK cookbook (Volume 1 – 2019, Volume 2 – 2020), and Best UK Published Asian Cookbook (Curry Compendium – 2022). My teenage son was very impressed by the layout of the recipes, and by the addition of the QR codes, which allow you to watch YouTube videos for many of the recipes before you start to cook. In Curry Compendium, Richard Sayce expertly combines both volumes of his best-selling, Gourmand award-winning Indian Restaurant Curry at Home books, with a sprinkling of new recipes, to create the ultimate guide to cooking excellent British Indian Restaurant food in your own kitchen. The Base Gravy recipe caters for approximately 16 people portions, so I used 1/3 for this meal, put 1/3 in the fridge for another day, and froze 1/3 for later.Thank you to Literally PR and Misty Ricardo’s Curry Kitchen for the invitation to join the blog tour for the Curry Compendium. I have thoroughly enjoyed cooking from the book, the food has been great, simple and easy to follow with the basics all being explained for any novice cook.

DISCLOSURE: I was provided with a free copy of this book for the purposes of writing a honest and impartial review. After trying many recipes I found Misty Ricardo and now we won’t eat out because it’s not as good as we make. How the (mainly Bangladeshi) chefs created their divine-tasting food was seemingly a closely-guarded secret and inaccessible to everyone else. Everything is described in fantastic detail, from the basic ingredients and spices, to cookware, how to make the perfect base gravy, upscaling ingredients and techniques to make the dishes as authentic as possible. If you love eating curry at a local restaurant, why not grab a copy of the book and try cooking your favourite recipes at home?

The books have tonnes of delicious and unique recipes between them, most of which can be made with different combinations of ingredients for extra variety. Also there’s lots of other content: blogs, a library of the Misty Ricardo YouTube videos, and a section dedicated to suggested suppliers of ingredients and products, and much more. Trading Address (Warehouse) Unit E, Vulcan Business Complex, Vulcan Road, Leicester, Leicestershire, LE5 3EB.

What is particularly good is that it is a very large sized book and the font is large and the pictures to support are also great. I’ve enjoyed reading the comprehensive introduction to the book, learning about the specialist ingredients, how to source them and advice for cooking equipment. I just want to make everything, because I can see so many ways in which my own previous curry style can be improved.A QR code is included for most recipes which can be scanned with a smartphone to instantly open up the associated YouTube video- A quick and easy base gravy recipe to cook in 30 minutes- Scaling Up - a detailed but easy to follow chapter about cooking multiple curry portions at once- Inside an Indian Restaurant kitchen - a chapter showing the workings of a busy kitchen. A firm love of Indian food in both home and restaurant styles gives plenty of motivation to experiment and try out new recipes and ideas. Yes you can pick it up, flip to a recipe and start preparing your curry, but without reading the first part of the book that teaches you about pre-cooking chicken (and the reasons why), how to make mix spices and base curry and even watching the video tutorial on how to make basic curry sauce, your curries probably won’t be as good quality and flavoursome as your favourite Indian restaurant or takeaway.