Pressure Cooker Recipe: Kerala Coconut Chicken Curry

I have a cookbook problem. No, I don’t have too many (well, maybe that too). While the bookstores are glutted with cookbooks, and a new crop inundates us every season, I cannot find the one definitive cookbook I crave — a South Indian cookbook to guide me through learning how to cook recipes from Tamil Nadu, Kerala, and Goa. I crave South Indian food like nothing else, and today’s recipe is another effort to reproduce the lighter, fresher, coconut-driven curries I love.

I have tried many cookbooks, looking for the one to guide me to authentic and delicious South Indian cuisine. I’ve found a recipe here and there, but cookbooks tend to fall into two camps. The first is cookbooks that are published in the United States, with recipes and ingredients simplified for an American audience. Sometimes these are all right, but more frequently they give results that don’t taste as full or authentic.

The second camp is that of cookbooks straight from India; I have a friend who regularly brings me new books to try. These tend to be more authentic, but I struggle to translate some of the ingredients, and to interpret instructions, which often assume a lot and take a certain level of familiarity with Indian cooking for granted.

But it’s worth the hunt — because South Indian food, for me, is the gold standard in taste and bright, astonishingly interesting flavors.

Speaking very simplistically, South Indian food tends to be lighter, with drier and less rich gravies than the creamier curries of the north. The curries often rely quite a bit on toasted and ground coconut in the “masala” (the spice paste that is prepped before the curry itself is made). There is more use of tamarind, the intensely tangy fruit, and of curry leaves. Curry leaves add a fragrant, slightly spicy flavor to dishes like this, and for me they are one of the key notes of authenticity in South Indian cooking.

This curry, honestly, should have curry leaves, but I left them out because they are a rare ingredient for many people. They can be found fresh at most Indian groceries, and I love to use them when I get my hands on them. If you pick some up, throw in 20 or so during the simmering/pressure cooking phase.

Using the pressure cooker for this recipe helps all these flavors meld and permeate the chicken even better than they would after a long slow simmer. And it’s ready fast — even considering the time it takes to prepare the masala, with its range of spices.

This recipe, like many others I make these days, comes not from a cookbook, but from a blog. I adapted it for my taste, and for the pressure cooker, from a Keralan cook’s blog: Induget’s Cooking.

I’m always on the hunt for recipes like this — flavorful and delicious curries from the South of India. Do you have others you can recommend? Or a cookbook that really gets it right?

(Images: Faith Durand)