Name: Grain-Free Japanese Curry Roux (カレールー)
Cook time: 25 min
Ingredients: 3 tbsp butter (preferably grass-fed); 2 tbsp arrowroot starch; 2 tbsp tapioca starch; 1 tbsp curry powder; 1 tbsp garam masala

In the previous post, I introduced my new kitchen project to create a Japanese curry meal that was as delicious as it was healthy and wholesome. To recap:

The Challenge: Make a wholesome Japanese Curry that is at least as delicious as the stuff that people rave about with facial expressions out of a manga comic.

The Rules: No refined sugar, no gluten, no additives, no nightshades, no inflammatory oils.

The Adjudicator: A native Japanese and self-proclaimed curry-lover (although you could argue that the second statement is a logical implication of the first). Let’s call him M.

The Caveat: I’ve never even had Japanese curry before *laughs nervously*

I divided the challenge into three parts. The first part was to create my own fukujinzuke, the pickled condiment that often accompanies curry dishes in Japan. Let’s move on to the next step!

The Challenge — Part II
Curry Roux (カレールー)

Curry was introduced to Japan in the 19th century, by officers from the British Royal Navy, who started entering Japan in 1853, putting an end to a long period of relative isolation from the rest of the world. These curry dishes, which reflected British tastes much more than Indian ones, started appearing in Japanese cookbooks as early as 1872. They were mild-tasting gloppy, brown mixtures of meat and vegetables, sweetened with apples and thickened with flour.

Chefs quickly started adapting curry dishes to Japanese tastes, and refining the recipes. They quickly replaced flour, which tends to form lumps when added to liquids, with roux, a cooking technique that comes from French cuisine.

Roux (pronounced roo) is a thickener for sauces, soups and stews, made by cooking flour (usually wheat flour) in fat (usually butter, lard, or other rendered fats) at low temperatures until the flour begins to change colour. Heating the flour deactivates the enzymes that encourage clumping when they are mixed with liquid. Roux is also a more stable thickener than simple starch slurries, and has the additional advantage of imparting a nice nutty flavour to dishes thanks to the browning of flour (The Culinary Institute of America: 2002)

Roux makes curries smoother and tastier, but it is also a time consuming process. It was in 1954, when Japan’s large food corporations started introducing solid curry roux blocks, that making curry at home was suddenly very convenient and accessible to people across Japan. Unfortunately, these blocks contained not only flour and fat, but also a whole slew of flavour and colour enhancers, and preservatives.

Page from 美味しんぼ (Oishinbo), a manga about food, from the volume dedicated to curry (Kaiya 1990)

The practice of making curry roux has not entirely disappeared though. There are even a few recipes for it floating around the web. I am thankful to Nami, from Just One Cookbook, for her detailed instructions on how to make curry roux at home, using only butter, flour and spices. All I had to do was replace the wheat flour with some grain-free starches. I chose a blend of tapioca and arrowroot starch, which are also often used as thickeners, and it worked really well.

Joëlle

Grain-Free Japanese Curry Roux (カレールー)

Curry roux is the basis for making a whole range of delicious Japanese curries. Making it at home is a much more wholesome alternative to buying industrially packaged curry cubes from the store. And with grass-fed butter, it's absolutely delicious!

25 minCook Time

25 minTotal Time

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Ingredients

3 tbsp butter (preferably grass-fed)
2 tbsp arrowroot starch
2 tbsp tapioca starch
1 tbsp curry powder
1 tbsp garam masala

Instructions

Melt butter in a small saucepan over low heat.
When the butter has melted, add arrowroot and tapioca starch, and cook, stirring constantly for about 20 minutes, or until the mixture turns light brown.
Mix in curry powder and garam masala, remove from heat and transfer to another container.

Notes

If you choose not to use it immediately, you can store it in the fridge for up to a month, or freeze it for up to three months.

Nutrition

Calories

125 cal

Fat

1 g

Carbs

30 g

Protein

1 g

Click Here For Full Nutrition, Exchanges, and My Plate Info

https://www.joellegaudet.com/2019/02/13/instant-pot-japanese-chicken-curry/

The Challenge — Part III
Chicken Curry (チキンカレー)

With my jars of fukujinzuke maturing in the fridge, and a pot of golden curry roux, it was finally time to make curry! I bought some local, pastured chicken thighs from my neighbourhood butcher’s, and marinated them overnight in shio koji. This probably wasn’t necessary, but I wanted every umami advantage I could get in order for my curry to stand up against the processed version that M was used to eating, and loved.

How else could I amp up the flavour of my curry? I browsed various recipes and noticed that many people added Worcestershire sauce or tonkatsu sauce (which contains Worcestershire sauce) to their curries for flavour. Although commercially-produced Worcestershire sauce was definitely out of the question (it transgresses the first three parts of ‘The Rules’, see above), some of its ingredients are indeed powerhouses of umami and flavour, while being perfectly wholesome. I decided to create my own ‘deconstructed Worcestershire sauce’ recipe

Deconstructed Wordcestershire Sauce

Soy Sauce (gluten-free tamari, in my case)
Tamarind paste
Molasses (I used organic blackstrap molasses)
Anchovy paste

(Garlic and onion are also important components of Worcestershire sauce, but since I was already using them in another part of the recipe, I omitted them here).

Finally, I decided that the chicken and vegetables should be simmered in my homemade bone broth, for another umami kick.

The Results

I am happy to say that my chicken curry turned out better than I could ever have imagined. Alas, I will never be able to tell you how it stacks up to curries made from processed curry cubes, but if the gusto with which M devoured his second helping of my dish is of any indication, then I did not fail my challenge. Far from it!

More importantly, I enjoyed my dish much more than I had envisioned. And now that I have mastered and demystified the basics of Japanese curry, I look forward to trying out other Japanese curry dishes!