'You get more intense flavour from a slow cooker' - The Curry Guy Dan Toombs on home cooked dinners
You don’t have to spend all your money on a takeaway to have a delicious curry at home – just ask Dan Toombs, AKA the Curry Guy. Toombs, 60, is obsessed with bringing curries to the masses, and has just released his 11th cookbook, The Curry Guy Slow Cooker.
After moving to the UK from California in 1993, Toombs fell in love with the British curry scene, later begging his way into restaurants to learn the secrets of the perfect dish. Now based near York, Toombs knows a thing or two about taking curry to the next level.
If you have a slow cooker, it could be the secret to more flavourful curries with a whole lot less effort, he says.
“What you do get from a slow cooker is a more intense flavour, because you’re not trying to rush things,” Toombs says. “You’re letting all those ingredients melt together.”
Plus, it’s a lot easier than standing over a hot stove. “The thing I like about slow cookers is you really can set them and forget them, so you can go to work and know there’s not going to be any kind of issues. You’re not going to burn anything to the bottom of the pan or anything like that.”
Toombs recommends trying his recipe for lamb nihari in the slow cooker. “It’s a northern Indian/Pakistani dish which is traditionally cooked over a low heat and simmered for about three or four hours, so it’s perfect for a slow cooker,” he explains.
“You can put it in a slow cooker on high for about four hours, or if you go to work and put the meat in there – which is normally lamb shanks – just let it become really tender for eight hours [on the low setting].”
There’s another benefit to trying your next curry in the slow cooker, with Toombs saying it transforms some of the cheaper cuts of meats into the best dishes, saving you a bit of money along the way.
“A lot of times the cheap cuts have the most flavour – the reason why they’re cheap is because they take so long to cook. But if you’re putting it in the slow cooker, it doesn’t make any difference. You let it sit there and simmer until it’s cooked through and really tender, and you get a better flavoured meat and it’s a lot less expensive.”
Toombs was born and raised in California, where his grandfather shared family recipes that instilled a love for cooking at an early age. But it was only after moving to the UK that he found a love for curry. Not the authentic cuisine found in Indian and Pakistan but the dishes developed for the English palate at hundreds of restaurants across the country.
“When I first came to Britain I tasted Indian food and loved it,” he previously told The Yorkshire Post. “You can’t get it in California so I had been missing out. I tried cooking at home but I had no idea there was a difference between traditional Indian recipes and the takeaway version.”
He soon realised the British takeaway food he loved was actually far removed from the traditional recipes he was following in cook books. And so he set about trying to recreate the dishes he loved in the many Indian restaurants he visited and decided to put his recipes together in a blog he named the Curry Guy in 2010.
He later came up with the idea of getting his family to live on Indian food for a year. Still, it took a while for interest in his blog to take off, but just as the year was nearly up a couple of national newspapers caught on to Dan’s story.
“People then started to ask me lots of questions about my recipes and everyone seemed quite happy with it and so we thought we’d extend it. In the end we nearly did two years, although I have a feeling the children may have had the odd burger while out with friends.”
Dan now has followers across the globe, including, ironically a following in India. In his latest cookbook, he offers ‘foolproof’ recipes for creating curryhouse classics in the slow cooker at home, with minimal fuss and washing-up.
The main thing Toombs learned from his time in curry house kitchens? It’s all about the base. “There’s a base sauce” for pretty much every curry that’s made, he says. “It’s quite a bland sauce, similar to chicken stock or vegetable stock. When it’s not seasoned, you have this bland stock that you add to almost every curry, and the magic happens when it hits the pan, because you have different spices to make the different curries.”
So if you get this base sauce down – and it’s “quite simple to make”, according to Toombs – you’re golden. “It’s the secret behind how to make real curry house-style foods. It’s not something they do very much in India, it’s really a British thing,” he says.
This base sauce is basically “an onion stock – a lot of places will put other vegetables in it, like cabbage and green pepper, but nothing that has bite to it”, and from there you can create pretty much any curry you like.
While recipes are a useful guide, Toombs warns against getting too hung up on them. “A lot of people concentrate too much on the recipe rather than what they personally enjoy,” he explains. So if you like quite a saucy curry, add more stock when you’re cooking, or if you enjoy spice, then pump up the chillies.
He recommends “trying things as you go, especially if you’re trying to teach yourself how to cook” so you can “begin to know what the different spices taste like” and will know how to adjust your dish accordingly.
It’s all about trial and error, he says. “You’ll get the idea behind it, and you can make up your own recipes once you know how to use that base sauce.”
Curry Guy Slow Cooker by Dan Toombs is published by Quadrille, priced £16.99. Photography by Kris Kirkham. Available now.