I Love Curry: The Best Indian Curries You'll Ever Cook Hardcover – 9 Oct 2014

For a number of years I had an ambition to make curries to a similar standard to my local restaurants - a couple of months ago I bought and borrowed about 10 recipe books - purchased every spice known to the Asian continent & began cooking - the first couple of attempts were so-so (6/10 efforts) but I learnt the basics quickly, i.e making a smooth paste of fresh Ginger/Garlic/Onion is a good base for many dishes & crushing the spices together with a mortar & pestle is advised! - I managed to make tasty curries on about the third or fourth attempt (though still not quite as nice as the better curry houses!).
After repeating my success a few times it was time to move on & that's where "I Love Curries" comes into it's own.
I had seen Anjum Anand on the Good Food channel & liked her ideas & her approach to explaining the cooking process - her book impresses immediately - it is well laid out & very attractive with enticing photos of completed meals.
She provides a good introduction to Indian cooking - explains the role of many spices & ingredients & also gives hints on how to "rescue" any curries that are not quite right when they are close to completion.
The book says "The best Indian curries you will ever make" - well to date the two I have made have been about the best so far for me - a Spicy Chicken Andhra & a Green Chilli Chicken Balti - both fairly straightforward & both delicious - I did slightly tweak her method - adding a few things & simmering at the end for about 25 minutes whilst the rice was coming along - this also gave more time for the chicken to cook & tenderise - I liked her tip of piercing Green Chillies and leaving them to cook whole in the curry - very tasty.
So far I'm very impressed I will soon go on to try her Lamb Rogan Josh & Beef Madras - again they look fairly straightforward to make & I anticipate a good result.
Originally I was going to start off with her Pork Vindaloo but my basic knowledge suggested to me that it might not be a successful method - I tried a similar version from another book with more sauce & a longer cooking time & the pork & potato were both still "tough" - so I have reservations about that particular recipe.
To sum up I feel that this book will advance a "modest" curry maker such as myself to a higher level - my first couple of meals using this book have been to a comparable standard to meals that I pay two or three times more for from local curry houses!
Note : When I started off buying spices a few months ago I bought them from the main supermarkets - I strongly advise that if you have a sizeable Asian community near to you then get down to one of their mini markets - items such as bay leaves, cinnamon, mustard seeds etc can be a little as 25% of the cost of a large supermarket & main spices such as turmeric, paprika etc are usually half the cost & they will have more choice of makes.

I've had this book for years now and we love it. We refer to the book all the time and have even gone out on our own a bit more successfully than we might otherwise have done. She does love to simmer things endlessly and I say ba humbug! Have pressure cooker and will use it. Nevertheless the curries do turn out rather well even in a pressure cooker (reduce the amount of fluid added), sometimes far better for it. It makes for very tender meat even with the cheapest cuts. But not to worry if you like taking it slow, they still turn out delicious and not all the recipes take hours. The spices are more obtainable than you may think so don't panic. I do recommend going for the Kashmiri chillies - they are milder than the run of the mill dried chillies, but you can taste the authentic flavours better rather than just the heat. What I also recommend that you buy is the right blenders. We have an electric coffee grinder to grind spices which copes well with even cinnamon sticks and a small blender to grind up the garlic and the ginger. Once you start grinding your own spices you'll never go back. I stopped copying her recipes into my folder because it would mean copying out the whole book. They say you only use 2-3 recipes from each book, that's definitely not the case with this book. It's great value for money.

I received this as a present a few years ago and have steadily gone through and cooked most of the curries in it. Everything tastes wonderful. I consider myself a good cook, but had little experience of cooking Indian food. I cannot recommend this book enough. Every recipe works, no tweaking required, and every person who has tried these dishes sings their praises (well, they sing mine, but all I'm doing is following the instructions!) I love practical cookbooks that you can really cook from, and this is most certainly one of them. (I have a couple of "pretty" ones by famous chefs that have languished on the bookshelf and eventually gone to charity shops). My copy of this cookbook has plenty of splatters from frequent kitchen use.

Like many people, we have a lot of cookery books and many of these are curry books. However, this is the one we use most. The recipes will require you to buy a group of about 10 different spices - readily available and reasonably priced. Once you have bought them, you will find that they last you a good long time and that the replacement cost, as you use them is very modest.
The recipes in may seem quite complicated but they are not. Most divide into 3 parts - get a set of mixed spices together, make a paste of onions, garlic, ginger, tomatoes and plain yoghurt, then add them in order to meat or vegetables etc. on the cooker. If we are having friends round and we don't want to cook the curry ahead of time, then we sometimes prepare these elements ahead of time and just put them together at the time.
The results and tastes that you will get from this book are superb, truly superb. Once you have used the recipes contained here, you will find that the pre-bought pastes from the supermarket are really poor quality and are also very expensive in comparison. You may also subsequently find that Indian/Bangladeshi restaurant meals are sadly lacking too.
Definitely something for everyone and not too involved. A lovely chicken curry or lamb dopiazza typically takes us about 20 minutes to prepare and a further 20 - 30 minutes in the pan. The resulting curry is excellent.
As always, you will need to try the level of chilly-hotness for yourself and settle down on what you enjoy best - we have made loads of notes in the recipes so that we know how much chilly to use as compared to what is suggested.
We have also given this book to countless friends and they also have sung its praises - very highly recommended.