Topic: Lal maas -- anyone ever had it?

[ast]

Because neither of us were in any position to cook tonight, we, well I (my wife opted for the Caesar salad), chanced the new-ish takeaway just up the road.  It's one of those "everything" places like we were talking about on another thread, but, as I said there, it is supposed to be owned by an Indian guy who used to run a restaurant in town.

Anyway...

Rather than going for the "Chicken Madras-Vindaloo", I figured I'd branch out a bit, and they had this dish, Lamb Laal Maas, on the menu.  According to them, "a hot & spicy dish, with fresh & dried chillies for added pungency, cracked black pepper & corriander (sic) seeds."

I didn't see any coriander seeds, but I did notice chopped up coriander stems and leaves.  It was actually pretty good.  Here's what it looked like:

Those black things are the fresh chillies that have been roasted/blackened.  There was quite a bit of chilli powder in there as well.  I'd say the lamb wasn't really pre-cooked, or, if it was, it wasn't pre-cooked in very many spices.  It was tender, but it didn't have any additional flavors.

I was guessing that they probably used some chopped tomatoes given both the color and the tomato bits that I saw in it.  I'm pretty sure it had quite a bit of garlic in it too, but I'm not 100% sure what all the bits were.  I also guessed that they might've used about 50/50 tomatoes and curry base, but then I went hunting for a recipe and found this:

Lal maas means ?red meat?, from the Kashmiri red chilli powder that naturally colours the dish. We make our dishes traditionally but in this case we cut down the chilli heat even though it was still quite hot (as you can see from the recipe) and this was the hottest dish on the menu. Rajasthan is very hot and in common with other hot climates, the people of Rajasthan also like their food chilli hot: Pravin told me the Indian expression ?iron cuts iron?, so hot food in hot climates. He also said that the good water in Rajasthan, which rises out of the sand, makes food particularly digestible.

For Lal maas, we used leg of lamb and to make it, ask your butcher to cut through the leg bone at the narrow end for the pieces on the bone. In India, however, the dish would be made with various cuts of lamb. Pravin learned this recipe while at Rajvilas in Jaipur and has since adapted it in much the same way home cooks do across Rajasthan. For this recipe, he did not include the method for smoking the clove masala as it needs real care and experience to avoid hurting oneself or starting a fire, but if any of you are curious about this, post a comment or send a message and we?ll post this for you.


Lal maas

1kg lamb (mix of meat on the bone and cubed boneless meat)
30 whole dried red chillies
150ml vegetable oil + 25ml for tempering
50g ginger/garlic paste
60g garlic (finely chopped)
200g onion finely sliced
100g tomato chopped
5g green cardamom
3g black cardamom
3g bay leaves
3g cinnamon stick
3g cumin seed
20g Kashmiri red chilli powder
15g coriander powder
5g turmeric powder
5g cloves
salt to taste
6 cups strong lamb stock

Heat oil in large handi or pot. Add all whole spices except cloves. Add onion and stir-fry until onions are golden brown. Add ginger/garlic paste and keep stir-frying one or two minutes, then add meat. Increase flame to high and stir-fry to sear for 7-8 minutes or until meat changes colour. Reduce flame to medium, cover and simmer, stirring occasionally, for 10 minutes.

Uncover and stir-fry until oil leaves the sides of the pot. Add all the powdered spices and continue to stir-fry for 2-3 minutes. Now add chopped tomatoes and again stir-fry until oil leaves the sides of the pot.

Add lamb stock, bring to a boil, reduce to low heat, cover and simmer, stirring occasionally, until the meat is cooked and gravy is the consistency of a thin sauce. Remove from heat and adjust seasoning to taste.

For the tempering:
Heat the remaining oil in a frying pan, add cloves and chopped garlic, stir-frying over medium heat until light golden colour. Pour tempering over the meat and immediately cover with a lid. Allow to stand a few minutes and serve with steamed basmati rice.

(from http://baburlondon.blogspot.com/2007/04/hi-its-emdad-again.html)

This one didn't have a picture, but from other pictures I saw on the web, it looks like the more traditional recipes seem to be a bit drier than what I had.  I'm sure it wouldn't take too much experimenting to come up with something that would be close.

Anyone ever had this dish or have a BIR-ish recipe for it?  Not knowing what it's supposed to taste like, I think the one I had could be improved a bit.  I'd start with using one of the more flavorful pre-cooking methods for the lamb.

Any pointers to something closer to the above would be most appreciated.

Cheers,

ast

[Curry King]

Looks and sounds quite nice Ast, it could be a bit like the korai, every where you go it's different.  I'm sure some places just take a traditional authentic dish and apply BIR methods to it which makes it hard to work out.