Curry Compendium by Richard Sayce (aka Misty Ricardo) Review

07/12/2021

Curry in the UK is massive business, contributing billions of pounds to the British economy, with most British towns having at least one Indian restaurant (although curry dishes in the UK are generally Indian dishes modified for British tastes). Now you can create your own BIR (British Indian Restaurant) style curries in the comfort of your own home with Misty Richardo’s Curry Compendium by Richard Sayce (aka Misty Ricardo).

Richard Sayce, the man behind Misty Ricardo’s Curry Kitchen and top-selling paperback books Indian Restaurant Curry at Home: Volume 1 & 2 has combined the two books into one compendium featuring content from both of the books into a quality hardback format, added a splattering of new recipes, and updated many of the photographs and illustrations to create a new superb curry cookbook that would make an ideal gift for the curry lover in your life that wants to expand their tastes or just wants to try out a curry for the first time.

This new book offers 99 fully detailed recipes, covering starters, mains, sides, rice, accompaniments, and traditional Indian & streetfood. With just under 100 mouth-watering, easy to follow recipes to try out and delight your tastebuds, any curry lover will just love this recipe book!

99 recipes, fully detailed and explained, covering starters, mains, sides, rice, accompaniments, and traditional Indian & streetfood
Video Tuition throughout. A QR code is included for most recipes which can be scanned with a smartphone to instantly open up the associated YouTube video
A quick and easy base gravy recipe to cook in 30 minutes
Scaling Up – a detailed but easy to follow chapter about cooking multiple curry portions at once
Inside an Indian Restaurant kitchen – a chapter showing the workings of a busy kitchen
Additional recipe photos crediting social media followers
Based on the top-selling, Gourmand award winning paperbacks Indian Restaurant Curry at Home Volumes 1 & 2

These are all backed up with detailed and comprehensive informational chapters: everything you need to learn the art of curry cooking.

Overall, this is an excellent book to teach you how to prepare and cook delicious BIR (British Indian Restaurant) style curries at home. I don’t want to call it a recipe book as it is so much more than that. To me, a recipe book is a book that you just pick up, flip to the recipe that you want and follow the instructions. Yes, once you are 100% sure in what you are doing when cooking BIR curries then you can that, but when you are just starting out you will need to read the book and watch the tutorial video for making basic curry sauce for all the information needed in how to prepare and cook BIR properly.

At the start of the book, it covers what different spices that you will use, what cookware and utensils that you will need, how to make a batch of mix spices and base gravy, the essential of BIR cooking, as well as how to use and store them. It even goes into the differences about why a restaurant / takeaway curry tastes better than a homecooked one (with a lot of it down to cooking heat) and why it is a good idea to pre-cook chicken for use later in your curry. And for those of you that like to eat a curry the next day (apparently it tastes better the day after) it even tells you how to reheat a curry the next day for best flavour.

Now for the actual curries. The featured recipes are for generous single potion Indian takeaway servings (unless stated otherwise) and there are details on how to make larger portions correctly (scaling up). Each of the 99 featured recipes gives an explanation about each dish as well as detailed instructions on ingredients needed and how to prepare and cook, next to high-quality images of each dish. Recipes can also easily be adapted by changing the main ingredient. And if you are more of a visual cook or just want to see how it is done, on each recipe page is a QR code that you can scan to see a video (with instructions) of each dish being made. The recipes even have authors notes on them, giving little hints and tips, or information on what ingredients can be substituted for others etc.

The back of the book is also a plethora of information. As well as an index so that you can easily find the dish that you want to create, it has a very useful shopping list of essential ingredients, cookware and utensils you will need to keep in the pantry if you plan on cooking a lot of the recipes, as well as “and nice to have” ingredients. And to help even further it has a small list of online suppliers where you can buy spices and other ingredients.

Overall, if you love a curry and would love to recreate the taste of a takeaway or restaurant meal then Richard Sayce’s (aka Misty Ricardo) Curry Compendium is definitely the recipe book to own. It is simple and straightforward to read and understand, without being pretentious, and explains all the steps in detail as well as the reasons why things need to be done a certain way.

This would make an excellent gift this year for the family member that loves a good curry and would like to be able to create their own BIR-style curry at home (and save a fortune by not getting loads of takeaways).

Rating: 5/5

RRP: £24.99 (Hardback)

For more information, visit mistyricardo.com. Available to buy from Amazon here.