Meera Sodha's tomato curry

January 15, 2022

   

Several friends have enthusiastically recommended Meera Sodha's East to me in the past year. I recently learned that Sodha has been contributing a vegan recipe column to The Guardian for years, so I've decided to get to know her cooking through that first, and spent a couple of hours on a Sunday afternoon bookmarking recipes in the archives. This curry interested me but I didn't bother to hold onto it, since Michael wouldn't be excited about such a tomato-heavy meal. But it remained fresh in my mind when Michael had a weekend out of town, and I went back in search of it. 

I had a nice time preparing this - toasting and grinding spices, chopping tomatoes, cooking everything down over half an hour - but I don't think I got it quite right. First, I wasn't able to buy curry leaves close by and I think they would have been terrific (I've kept them in the recipe below). Second, I cooked the curry for the recommended time period but I don't think I got the coconut milk down to the stage that Sodha aims for. Certainly my curry looks very different to The Guardian photo, though it can be hard to know sometimes where a recipe ends and the aspirational food styling begins. 

Anyway, my coconut milk remained quite milky over the instructed 20-25 minutes, and over several reheats in the following days, so perhaps I need to turn up the heat and/or take a lot longer over the final simmering stage. I did an image search of thakkali kuzhambu, the dish that inspired Sodha's, and it seems to be quite liquid in most cases, with the tomatoes collapsing or blended into the gravy.

Meera Sodha's tomato curry

(a recipe published in The Guardian, where it's credited to her book East)

1 1/4 teaspoons fennel seeds

1 1/4 teaspoons black mustard seeds

1 1/4 teaspoons cumin seeds

1 1/4 teaspoons coriander seeds

4 tablespoons vegetable oil

2 onions, finely chopped

1 1/4 teaspoons salt

8 fresh curry leaves

1.2 kg mixed tomatoes (I used a kilo bag of medium-sized plus a punnet of colourful cherry-sized)

1 green chilli, finely chopped

4 cloves garlic, minced

2 1/2 teaspoons tamarind paste

400mL can coconut milk

In a frypan over medium heat, toast the fennel, mustard, cumin and coriander seeds for a couple of minutes. Turn off the heat and grind them coarsely with a mortar and pestle.

Put the frypan back on medium heat and pout in the oil. Add the onions, salt and curry leaves. Cook them for 10-12 minutes, until the onions are well softened. During this time, slice the tomatoes into large bite-sized pieces.

Add the chilli and garlic to the onions, cooking for a further 2 minutes. Transfer half of the onion mixture to a second frypan and set it over medium heat too. Divide the tamarind and coconut milk between the two frypans and stir it into the onion mixture. Spread the tomatoes out over the milky mixture, ideally in a single layer. Cook the tomatoes, without stirring, for 20-25 minutes. Sodha says that the aim is to drive off the water in the coconut milk, such that you can see oil on the sides of the pan, but the tomatoes remain juicy. I'll try cooking mine longer next time.

Serve with naan or rice.