Topic: Pre cooked chicken

[Stephen Lindsay]

adamvfc I did a wee search myself and came across this link:

http://www.curry-recipes.co.uk/curry/index.php/topic,11667.msg91108.html#msg91108

I just wanted to mention that this is a bit of an old post and I have since moved on to using the Viceroy Brasserie's method instead. The c2g method compared to this one is a beginner's approach and does not seem to work every time.  This topic documents my current precooking method with a video and pictures.

http://www.curry-recipes.co.uk/curry/index.php/topic,11787.0/topicseen.html

As a lot of people have already mentioned before, you don't need to pre-cook the chicken, but it does help to infuse extra flavour, to tenderise and to get through the cooking quickly than otherwise. It's a staple in my kitchen! I do only a minimal change, to enhance the stock, which is to blend a pepper with onion that goes with the solids at the bottom of the pan where the chicken is precooked and back into the container where the chicken is put (tip taken from bengali bob)

Naga I agree - I am rarely in a hurry therefore pre cooking is not something I do usually

Hmm. What specifically is it that saves you time when cooking the chicken fresh with each curry? I'm honestly curious. I do see your point about the stage1 reduction providing almost the same level of flavor infusion as a precooking method, but I'd imagine you would not be saving time there and it would probably make the stage1 a bit more "pan driven", as you would be scraping more often than not? Perhaps you are distributing the overhead, rather than having a single laborious go, which is a plausible excuse. I personally prefer the precooking method as I take 2-3 hours of the day in which I make the base and just get through about 20-25 breasts, half of which go straight into the freezer and the other half is kept in a container for "service" for approx. 3-5 days.

Hi goncalo we may be talking at slightly cross purposes or maybe I've not been very clear in my post. I'm not arguing that I save time cooking chicken from fresh as opposed to pre-cooking but I am actually arguing the opposite, i.e. that cooking fresh chicken takes longer or conversely that pre-cooking saves time when you assemble a one-off curry. As I'm not cooking against the clock (like a TA) and therefore getting a curry out quickly is not a priority for me. Hence I cook fresh breasts when the Stage 1 Taz base has almost fully reduced. Hope this helps.

Steve