How To Make Southern Indian Lamb Curry

Curry spices, tomatoes, onion and garlic combine in a thick, tasty gravy in this Southern Indian Lamb Curry. It would be traditional for this dish to have quite a bit of spice from hot chiles but you can regulate that as you wish. We serve this with some coconut rice and raita. This is a really easy dish to make and it has a big flavorful payoff. It does need about 3 hours but most of that time is just simmering things in the pot.

This recipe is naturally gluten free.

Watch a Video

Here is a video of 2 Cooks in the Kitchen making Southern Indian Lamb Curry:

Chop Onions and Tomatoes

We can start with a little prep work. Our onions and tomatoes need to be cut into chunks. In both cases you don’t have to make then too small, you can just roughly chop them. The tomatoes are going to cook in the pot until they fall apart. The onions are going into the food processor along with the garlic and the hot chile.

Ginger, Garlic and Chiles

We will put the onions in a different bowl with the ginger, garlic and chiles. You can decide how hot you want this dish to be and adjust the chiles accordingly. We are using one small rocoto which will give it a little bite but won’t make it too hot.

Cut the Lamb

Then we need to cut our lamb. We find an average leg of lamb to be about 5 pounds. This recipe calls for 3 pounds so we’ll cut part off and freeze it for a future use.

Now we will cut the lamb into large bite size pieces. We like to get a nice big bite of lamb when we are going through a dish so we leave them big.

Mix the Spices

We also need to prepare our spice mix. We are going to start with whole spices and grind them to get the most flavor. These are the customary curry spices; cumin seed, coriander seed, fennel seed, whole cloves and turmeric. We’ll want to get these ground up fairly well. We used to have a coffee grinder that we dedicated for spices but it burned up one day and had to be replaced. Now we have a really nice spice grinder that works even better.

Sweat the Spices In Coconut Oil

Now we can start cooking our curry. We will heat about 1/4 cup of coconut oil in a large stock pot over medium heat. When the oil is hot we will add our ground spices along with a cinnamon stick and 2 bay leaves. We want to let this cook for about 10 minutes to get the spices aromatic and make the house smell good. The pan might even smoke a little by the time we are done with this step.

Brown the Lamb

Next we will add our lamb and stir it into the spice mix. We’ll get this started cooking and then stir it from time to time so it browns evenly.

Blitz Onion, Chile, Garlic and Ginger

While our lamb is cooking we will put the onion mixture into the food processor and blitz it until it is somewhat smooth. We don’t need a cream sauce here, a little texture is going to be fine. Don’t forget to stir the lamb.

Add Onion Mixture to the Pan

After about 10 minutes the lamb should be browned all over. This is when it is time to add our onion mixture. You’ll want to stir this in well and get it cooking. The onions add a lot of moisture to the pot and we will need to cook some of that out. We’ll cook this for about 10 minutes.

Add Tomatoes

Once the onions have cooked some we will add the tomatoes. When we get these stirred in we have everything in the pot and we just need to let it simmer together for about 2 hours.

Serve the lamb curry with rice and yogurt or raita.

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Another Indian style curry recipe you might like is our Butter Chicken Recipe.

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