The encyclopaedia of gravy
The curry-house jalfrezi: a medium-hot, tomato-sharp curry built on base gravy, with chunks of onion and green pepper stir-fried hard so they keep their bite.
Jalfrezi is the curry-house dish where the vegetables matter. Onion and green pepper go in as chunks, cooked hard and fast so they blister at the edges and stay crunchy in the finished sauce. A jalfrezi with soft peppers has gone wrong.
The name comes from a colonial-era Bengali technique for frying up cooked meat with chillies. The BIR version is its own dish, and a considerably saucier one.
Before you start¶
You need base gravy (hot), mix powder and pre-cooked chicken. Read cooking a BIR curry first — the whole thing takes ten minutes and there is no time to look anything up.
Ingredients¶
Serves 2 · 10 minutes
- 3 tbsp vegetable oil
- 1 medium onion, cut into 2 cm chunks and separated into petals
- ½ green pepper and ½ red pepper, in 2 cm chunks
- 2–3 green chillies, sliced lengthways
- 1 tbsp garlic–ginger paste
- 1 tsp mix powder
- ½ tsp chilli powder
- ¼ tsp turmeric
- ½ tsp salt
- 3 tbsp tomato paste (or 1½ tbsp purée loosened with water)
- 400–500 ml hot base gravy
- 300 g pre-cooked chicken, with a little of its liquid
- 1 tsp white wine vinegar or lemon juice
- ½ tsp kasoori methi, crushed between your palms
- ¼ tsp garam masala
- A good handful of chopped coriander
Method¶
- Blister the vegetables. Heat 1 tbsp of the oil in a wide pan until it is very hot. Add the onion and pepper chunks and stir-fry for 2 minutes, until they are charred in patches but still firm. Tip them onto a plate.
- Start the curry. Add the remaining 2 tbsp oil to the pan. Fry the garlic–ginger paste for 30 seconds, then the green chillies for 30 seconds more.
- Fry the spices. Add the mix powder, chilli powder, turmeric and salt and stir for 20 seconds — they should sizzle in the oil.
- Tomato paste, 30 seconds, stirring, until it darkens.
- First ladle of base gravy — about 200 ml. Turn the heat up and let it bubble hard for a minute, until it thickens and starts to catch at the edges of the pan. Scrape it back in.
- Chicken and the second ladle. Add the chicken with its liquid and another 200 ml of base. Simmer 2–3 minutes.
- Vegetables back in for the last minute — just long enough to heat through, not to soften.
- Finish off the heat: vinegar, kasoori methi, garam masala and most of the coriander. Rest for a minute, scatter the rest of the coriander, and serve.
💡 Keep the crunch
The vegetables go in at the start and come back at the end. Leaving them in throughout is the single most common way to turn a jalfrezi into an ordinary medium curry.
Adjusting it¶
| Want | Do this |
|---|---|
| Hotter | More green chillies rather than more chilli powder — jalfrezi heat should be fresh and sharp |
| Milder | Deseed the chillies; drop the chilli powder to ¼ tsp |
| Drier | One less ladle of base, and bubble it harder |
| Saucier | A third ladle, and less reduction |
| Sweeter | 1 tsp tomato ketchup, which many restaurants use and few admit to |