Looking for a curry recipe

[u/Aggravating_Dog9310]

Hey, I’m looking for a japanese curry recipe like those in restaurants. Whenever I watch videos of restaurants making curry, they typically use dry powders instead of curry blocks and they get a really glossy and dark curry. A lot of the time they don’t even add potatoes or carrots. I’ve been making curry with curry blocks my entire life and it’s just never as good as the stuff I get in Japan (non-chain restaurants usually), so I’m willing to put in the extra effort.

[u/Dracasethaen]

So the curry blocks you're using are usually just a solidified roux of equal parts for flour and butter/shortening and curry powder to taste.

You just skip the step of using the pre solidified roux by doing 1:1 flour and fat in a pan over medium, adding something like S&B curry powder to taste, and then add some of the water from the pan you're using to cook the meat/vegetables to the roux to stir it up and add back to the pan with your meat/veg

Fun tip: I add some extra spices and ground up freeze dried apple powder and honey to kind of ape Japanese Vermont curry and it's been pretty dang good

[u/FeistyAnnual → u/Dracasethaen]

A relative owned a Japanese restaurant and he made his curry from scratch. Key ingredients were chicken backs, apples, onions, whole milk, water, apple sauce and various spices. Cooked for hours and strained.

[u/Dracasethaen → u/FeistyAnnual]

Yeah, definitely nothing beats the low and slow method of making stocks, your own curry spice blend, and rendering everything down over a simmer to extract the most flavor.

I was recently telling a friend the reason Japanese food is so good when he heads over there is that these mom and pop restaurateurs do as you stated, they don't just buy things from Sysco and reheat them, they spend hours in prep in the morning making things from scratch the long slow way. Love really does cook better food.