Episode 3: Lamb Vindaloo

This recipe originally appeared on my facebook page as "Eric is bored at work, so here's a recipe for some random shit. Episode 3: Vindaloo"

Let us first ask the question many of you are asking yourself: What is Vindaloo? The answer, my friend, is long and interesting. Let's imagine you're Portuguese. Better yet, let's imagine it's the early 16th century and you're Vasco de Gama, recently arrived in Goa to buy some cardamom or something. (For the culturally illiterate, Goa is small state on the west coast of India in the Konkan region, bordered on the north by Maharashtra and to the east and south by Karnataka.) You land in some delightful town that will one day be named Vasco de Gama (seriously, they named the town Vasco de Gama) with a mad hunger for some "Carne de Vinha d'Alhos", which your lovely wife made for you before you headed off for your latest trade voyage. Wandering the streets you find a lovely cafe and settle in to eat. But lo! Your purse has been nicked by a street ruffian, and all of your precious escudos are gone! What to do?

Well, here's what you do, you resourceful 16th century Portuguese trader who this very town will one day be named after: You negotiate a deal with the cafe owner, in which you will demonstrate how to make this delicious "Carne de Vinha d' Alhos" that you are craving, and in return, the cafe owner will throw in the meal for free. Sounds good? Excellent! What, no pigs available? Well hell, let's substitute some lamb! [NOTE: Actual introduction of Carne de Vinha d'Alhos to Goan cuisine by Portuguese traders may have occurred in some specifically different manner, most likely involving introduction of syphilis on the side, but you get the picture.]

Throw in 500 years of co-mingling with local spices and the British popularizing love of all things curry, and the rest is history. In Short: Vindaloo is a Portuguese pork dish which over time was absorbed into Goan food culture and is typically prepared with lamb in modern times. It's peppery and vinegary and spicy and delicious, and you should really try it.

So, what the fuck is IN Vindaloo, you ask? Let me break it down for you. Go to your local grocery store and acquire the following:

A couple of lamb shanks
A few potatoes
A bulb of garlic
A large yellow or spanish onion.
Some cilantro
Some wine-based vinegar (I like white wine vinegar, but anything works).
Some fresh ginger
A handful or two of green chillies
A bag of brown sugar
One medium (the kind you can hold with one hand) can of crushed tomatoes
Plain Yogurt (I like to use the kind made from lamb's milk, when I can find it)

Now, go to your local spice store, or a whole foods, or wherever you can find them, and get:

Ghee (clarified butter. Doesn't have to be refrigerated, keeps for ever, has a unique taste, and is very, very bad for you)
A bunch of black peppercorns
Coriander seeds
brown mustard seeds (NOT YELLOW. I have stressed this enough, but for the sake of argument, let's assume I have not, nor could I ever.)
cardamom pods
cumin seeds
Turmeric powder
Cinnamon in stick form (technically, it's going to be Cassia, but if you can get your hands on real cinnamon bark, I applaud your persistence and resources)
Cloves (the actual cloves, not the hipster smokey treats)
Fenugreek seeds (these are really only available at specialty spice stores, or online, but are a necessity)
A couple of handfuls of Kashmiri peppers (you will not be able to find them, but if you can, sub them in for the green chillies)
Crystallized Ginger (Not absolutely necessary, but I use it. If you can't find fresh ginger at the store, double the amount of this in the recipe and you should be ok)

A note on spicy heat: This dish is supposed to be really spicy. I mean, really spicy. I mean, burn off the lining of your mouth spicy. When you go to a good Indian restaurant and order Vindaloo, the waiter's response should include "How spicy?" If some analogue of those words do not come out of his mouth, politely excuse yourself and go eat somewhere else because they will either bring you crappy vindaloo, or they have decided to collectively fuck with their customers, and will bring you vindaloo you will NOT be able to handle. I am not allowed to make this stuff full strength unless I am eating alone. So the recipe, as written, isn't going to be too bad from a heat perspective -- most of the spicy burn is going to come from the spice mixture. If you want to keep it real, double or triple the amount of chillies/peppers you put into the dish, and bump up the amount of ginger you use significantly. Fair warning, adding too much ginger will mess with the flavor proportions, but part of the fun of cooking is learning how to make a dish your own, so I encourage you to go to town.

A note on pork versus lamb: So, originally, this dish was a pork dish. If you make it with pork, it's still going to taste good. However, most people first encounter this dish in its current version, popularized by the Brits, in which lamb is used. If you want it to taste like the stuff in the restaurant, make it with lamb. It's going to work either way.

A further note on the meat part: You'll note that I listed lamb shanks for this dish. That's a choice, and one I hope you will follow me in making. If you choose instead to be a lazy-ass bitch and purchase pre-cubed lamb stew meat or some other shit, YOUR VINDALOO WILL SUCK. Part of the tastiness is the fat and cartilage found from the pieces of meat you cut off the bone rendering out into (for lack of a more technical term) tastiness as you slowly cook the vindaloo. So don't ruin the dish before you start by using stew meat, which is usually cut up pretty damn lean, has no fat attached, and is just generally wrong. If you use pork, just choose some cuts of pork that have fat and tendon and whatnot attached. You'll be fine.

One more note and then we'll get to it: To make this dish, you need whole spices (everything but the turmeric), and a way of grinding up those spices into the base of a paste. If you want to do it the hard way (and if you've read my other two recipes you know I like it hard) then get yourself a mortar and pestle. If you want to be a reasonably intelligent person and embrace the modern age, grab a $5 coffee grinder at a second hand store and use that for grinding your spices. That's what I do, and I'm fucking awesome (and still hard).

Cooking Vindallo, Part 1: Spice Paste (in which we create the spice paste, cut up some meat, and spend most of our time)

The day before you plan to eat your tasty vindaloo is the day you do most of the work. We're going to make a spice paste, and then coat the lamb in it, and then let it sit overnight. This has the dual benefits of allowing the spices' flavors to mingle and tenderizing the meat, thanks to the vinegar in the paste. If you don't have a whole day to do this, your dish will still be tasty, but please try to allot at least 1 full hour of lamb marination prior to cooking.

Ok, so take your gaggle of spices, put a small saucepan (dry) over low heat on the stove, and add the spices in the following proportions:

1 Tablespoon of black peppercorns
2 Teaspoons of coriander seeds
2 Teaspoons of cumin seeds
1 inch of a cinnamon stick
5 cloves
1 Tablespoon mustard seeds
1 Teaspoon Fenugreek seeds
5 cardamom pods

This is to taste, and you shouldn't worry about rounded tablespoons/teaspoons, etc. In general you probably want to measure these "easy" (over the pan, meaning you get a little more than you're measuring). As you try making this dish, you may find you like a little more cinnamon flavor, or a little less cadamom, etc. Have fun. I'll point out here (as I will later) that this dish is really easy to ramp up for more people: Just start doubling everything. Anyway.

Shake the pan about every couple of minutes and keep the spices over heat until your kitchen fills with the scent of spice. Another good marker of when they're ready is that your mustard seeds will have started to turn grey. Pro Tip: One of the secrets to Indian cooking is roasting your spices. I'm no expert on it, but at a basic level, a dish made with roasted spices is going to taste a lot better than if you just grind/mix spices straight out of the cupboard.

While you're heating up your spices (or before, depending on your knife skils), peel and mince fine that entire bulb of garlic. Don't look at me like that. You heard me. I said "The ENTIRE bulb of garlic." Thank you. Also, measure off a good inch or so of ginger, peel it and mince it up really fine as well.

Once your spices are roasted, toss them into your grinding implement, add a piece or two of crystallized ginger (if you're bothering) and grind them into a fine powder. Dump that into bowl large enough that you can envision filling it with your lamb AND stirring and mixing without making a mess, then add 1 Teaspoon of turmeric powder and mix it up good. If I knew how to bake, I'd say this is like baking (dry ingredients, then wet ingredients), but I don't, so it's purely conjecture on my part.

Now, add your minced garlic and ginger to the spices, mixing it up, then add a tablespoon of brown sugar (mixing it up). Get a nice, good mix going. Now start adding vinegar and stirring until you have a good, slightly watery paste. You can't really add TOO much vinegar here, but in general, we're looking for about 4 tablespoons to start, then keep adding until you feel you've got a good consistency. Key point: we're making a paste, not a soup.

A note on fenugreek: I don't know what fenugreek is. I don't know what plant it grows into, or if it's a seed, or what. what I do know is when I tried making vindaloo the first few times without using fenugreek (because I couldn't find it), the vindaloo never tasted quite right. The final flavor felt off, somehow. Particularly the vinegar. It seemed no matter how much vinegar I added (and I tried adding a LOT), I couldn't get that vinegary vindaloo taste at the end. Then Chaz found fenugreek (It's available at Fox and Obel in several varieties, apparently) and I made vindaloo, and it tasted RIGHT. So I'm going to take a stand and say that fenugreek is the spice that brings all the other spices together. You might make your lamb curry without fenugreek, but it'll be just that: lamb curry. It will probably taste great, too. But it won't be vindaloo).

Cover your bowl of vindaloo paste with plastic and toss it in the fridge. Take a break, stretch, clean up all the spice crap that's all over your kitchen. Give it a good 30 minutes to sit. Then pull out your cutting board/chopping block, a sharp knife, and the lamb shanks, and go to town. You want to cut everything off the bone, you want all the fat and sinew and cartilage, and you want to end up with vaguely cube-shaped chunks of lamb. Size is relative, as we all know too well, but I generally go for 3/4"-1" cubes.

Next, you want to take your chillies and de-seed them and slice them lengthwise, so you have a bunch of little chilli strips.

The final step of this, the "Spice Paste" segment of vindaloo is to take your spice paste out of the fridge, add the lamb cubes and strips of chillies, mix it up really nice, cover it back up and put it back in the fridge.

Step 2: Cook that Shit Up.

Quickly (because I realize this is starting to get really damn long):

Chop up the onion relatively fine.
Take another inch of ginger, peel and and either a) chop it up pretty fine or b) slice it into really thin (but large on the radii) pieces, like you were going to make ginger chips.
Peel your potatoes and cut them into smallish cubes (size of your lamb cubes or smaller)
Open the can of crushed tomatoes
Rip off a handful of cilantro

...and then...

Dump a tablespoon or two of ghee into a Large Pan. I like to use my dutch oven. Let it get good and heated under medium heat...
Toss the onion and ginger into the Pan, and cook until the onion is just barely getting brown and caramelized....
Toss in the potatoes, and stir them about until they just start to cook...
Toss in the bowl of tasty lamb in spice paste (pausing for a moment to let the smell blow your mind) and stir until the lamb begins to brown, as best you can (It's hard without a truly wide pan/pot to cook this in)...
Dump in the can of crushed tomatoes...
Dump in about a cup of water...
Throw in a dash of vinegar (for luck)...
Stir it up (using this opportunity to deglaze the bottom of the pan a little bit and scrape all that good burnt onion and ginger goodness that's bound to be there up into the mix), bring it to a boil, then reduce to a nice bubby simmer, and cook for about 2 hours, stirring occasionally (make sure to scrape the spice that accumulates on the side of the pan back down into the mix, as well as continuing to scrap up any fond that forms on the bottom of the pan)...

Taste it periodically. You'll know it's ready when a) It tastes fucking amazing and b) Most of the water has cooked off and it's starting to take on a thick, gravy-like texture. Toss that handful of Cilantro in, give it a stir, then go cook some rice to eat it on, serve and you're done. The Yogurt's for cutting the heat if it's too much to bear, and it also adds a delightful creaminess.

That's it! You made vindaloo! Good for you! You are special and loved!

This recipe will serve 4-6 people, unless they're fucking gluttons. If you're going to make it for more folks, just double everything, it's that easy. If you don't like it, go fuck yourself.

Cheers,
Eric