Day 84: a bitter imposter

I have long admired this one in the fantabulous At My Table: its concept, writing, and picture. It strongly appealed to my curiosity as I never knew something like this even existed. But, as with all things I want to try, I postpone and I postpone until the point of forgetting. However, the perfect opportunity arose to make Nigella’s Golden Egg Curry on the discovery of six duck eggs I found in the fridge door that I forgot I had.

Nigella’s Golden Egg Curry

I don’t really have any international supermarkets near me to pop and get things like tamarind paste. I know many local supermarkets sell their own versions but I tend to avoid sourcing these kinds of pastes from them: I find they lack flavour and fail to resemble anything close to authentic (not that I’m an expert you understand!). So, I took to online shopping and then ended up filling my basket with a delight of condiments and a packet of jellyfish, which I’ll be using for a jellyfish salad in accordance with acclaimed food writer Nicola Miller’s recipe (as soon as I can source a Nashi pear!).

Anyway, back to the curry. I blitzed everything together to make the wonderfully aromatic golden paste, before proceeding to heat the oil in the pan. I did have a taste of the raw paste and it was quite bitter, but I didn’t think much of it because it hadn’t even been cooked yet or melded with the creamily-sweet coconut milk. On tasting the final sauce/soup it was still very bitter. More so, in fact. I tried adding sugar and opened another can of coconut milk to use the solid creamy bit on top: I read that sugar and fat can help counteract overly bitter food. Neither really did the trick and the final sauce, although gorgeously tasting, was unpleasantly acrid.

This didn’t seem right to me. Nigella is a fond fan of bitterness in cooking but I do believe she would have mentioned its dominance in the recipe if it was intended to play such a big role. The next day I decided to taste each ingredient that went into the paste, one by one, with the hopes of identifying this acrid imposter. Initially, I thought perhaps the green chillies might be to blame because green peppers do have a bitterness I do not like. But, it wasn’t them. I also read that over-processing onion can make it bitter, but on further reading discovered there was little evidence to support this. No, the jail sentence goes to the shallots: they were horribly acrid and unpleasant just as they were, processed or not. A little nibble on one from the same packet I used for the paste left a burning sensation in my mouth and down my esophagus, not to mention the breath it gifted me with (one that no volume of mints seemed capable of shifting).

Flavour musings

Despite the bitter imposter, now identified as some unpleasantly acrid shallots, I was so happy to finally make this Golden Egg Curry and will be repeating the experience very soon (with some better-tasting shallots). Under that acrid taint, this golden soup was beautifully aromatic, creamily sweet, and wonderfully heated.