Just the other day we were in the store looking for coconut. We use a fair amount, mainly in our Best-ever Scratched Granola, which we make roughly every two weeks. As you’d suspect, that coconut is the sweetened flaked variety. But, on this shopping trip, we saw some Bob’s Red Mill unsweetened coconut that was being discontinued, with a sale price to match. We figured that it wouldn’t hurt our Best-ever Scratched Granola to have something more natural, plus unsweetened coconut might get us to make something savory.
On the ride home, we were busily thinking about what to make with some coconut, and came up with the idea of a coconut curry for dinner. We didn’t have too much in the way of vegetables in the house; some ears of corn, a few mushrooms, and frozen peas, but, we figured, that would be enough. We didn’t really want to write up a post specifically for a corn, pea, and mushroom coconut curry — our sauce is more flexible than that — so we decided to call it a Simmer Sauce, a sauce that you could use to simmer your choice of vegetables to make a meal. Sound good? Great! We’ll show you how we scratched this up!
Coconut Curry Simmer Sauce
Ingredients
- 2 Tbs canola oil
- 2 tsp brown mustard seeds
- 2 tsp yellow mustard seeds
- 2 tsp cumin seeds
- 1/2 tsp ground turmeric
- Pinch red chili flake
- 1/8 tsp cayenne pepper or to taste
- 1 tsp kosher salt
- 1-2 Tbs curry powder
- 1/4 cup diced onion
- 4 Tbs unsweetened flaked coconut
- 3/4 cup heavy cream
- Freshly ground black pepper
Instructions
- In a small bowl, combine mustard seeds, cumin seeds, turmeric, chili flake, cayenne pepper, salt, and curry powder.
- Heat oil in a medium skillet over medium-high heat. When hot, add the small bowl of spices, and cook, stirring until the mustard seeds begin to pop, about 1 minute. Add onion, reduce heat, and cook, stirring very often, until union is tender, about 5 minutes.
- Stir in coconut and heavy cream, reduce heat to a simmer, and cook, stirring often, about 3-5 minutes.
- Taste and adjust seasoning with salt and freshly ground black pepper.
Ingredient discussion:
Okay, this list of spices is moderately long, but don’t sweat it if you don’t have them all. The most important thing is probably the curry powder (duh, it’s called coconut curry simmer sauce). There are hundreds of different curry powders — basically, they’re a mix of spices, and nearly every Indian family has its own recipe — pick one you like. Be careful with the cayenne pepper, as it can be very hot. Use less than you think, then add more later if needed. For the heavy cream, we used organic, which is what we prefer because it’s just cream, nothing more.
Finally, once you have this simmer sauce, you can use it with whatever vegetables you want. We’d suggest partially cooking any that take more than a few minutes to cook — potatoes, cauliflower, etc. But quick-cooking vegetables can go right into the sauce while it simmers — think peas, green beans, mushrooms, and so on.
Procedure in detail:
Mix spices. We really only do this to make it easy to get all the spices into the hot oil all at once. So, find a small bowl, or a measuring cup, and mix together the mustard seeds, cumin seeds, turmeric, chili flake, cayenne pepper, salt, and curry powder.
Cook spices. Heat the oil in a medium skillet over medium-high heat. If you’ll be simmering something in the sauce, as we did, you might want to use a large skillet, one that’ll hold everything you’ll be adding. When the oil is hot, add the spices from the spice bowl, and stir until some of the mustard seeds begin to pop. This can take as little as 15 seconds to about a minute.
Cook onion. Once the seeds are popping, add the onion, reduce the heat to low, and continue cooking, stirring very often so the spices and onion don’t burn, until the onion is tender, about 5 minutes.
Add coconut and cream. Add the coconut flake and the cream, and stir, scraping up any bits that have stuck to the bottom, and continue cooking for about 3 minutes after the cream begins to simmer. Taste and adjust seasoning with salt and pepper.
Use your sauce. We had some fast- cooking vegetables ready: fresh corn, frozen peas, and a few quartered mushrooms, so we simply added them to the simmer sauce, covered the pan, and simmered everything for about 5 minutes, or long enough to cook everything. If we were using ingredients that would take longer, we would have pre-cooked them before adding.
This is a good curry. Probably not even close to authentic, but, for a sauce that takes less than 10 minutes to put together, it’s very tasty. We had our curry with a side of rice and thought that it had a nice coconut flavor, and it was rich and creamy. An easy four stars.
