Crockpot Attempt

So this weekend we tried My husbands chicken curry made in the crockpot... let me explain... my husbands chicken curry is pretty infamous especially in my family cause my father and brother really love it. One year for my brothers birthday our gift was a year of chicken curry at request. While that year is over we still make extra for him.

So if it could be made in the crockpot it would be great.

The basics of his chicken curry are:

cut up boneless, skinless chicken thighs
minced garlic
coconut milk
salt&Pepper (we use adobo instead of salt)
chilli powder
habeneros
Sri Lankan roasted curry powder (this is probably the secret ingrediant and I don't really know what is in it... one day I should probably figure out whats in it )

I think thats the recipe though (don't ask me about proportions/amounts... its a eastern thing)

so normally we dry marinade/dry rub the chicken in the curry powder, garlic,and chili powder then he browns the chicken... given the quantities of chicken we cook in one sitting this can get incredibly time consuming so my goal was to see if we could make it in the slow cooker and decrease the work that goes into it... (so if we're just making it for us at home it can be made with less hassles). So for this crockpot attempt we just cut up the chicken no marinading no browning... and threw it in the slow cooker with all the ingrediants and set it on high for 5hrs.

At the end of 5hrs the curry was not thick enough so he ended up taking the whole thing and throwing it on the stove and reducing it. All in all the critics said it was good (main critic being my brother of course)... so I met the goal which was to skip the browning step and come out with good chicken curry but it still required some external work (which in my mind I got the crockpot to get rid of to reduce the need for the external work).

So at the end of the day not sure if the crockpot attempt was 100% successful but I'd probably give it 85%. If we do try it again one thought would be to use half coconut milk and half coconut milk powder. We don't use coconut milk powder much these days but we always have it on hand (we bring it from Sri Lanka but I have seen it in a store recently... probably an indian store). Its a reasonable substitute for certain recipes but not all. I should probably add a note here about coconut milk (not the powder but the canned milk) Over time we've gotten a bit picky about which coconut milk brand we use (no I don't make my own coconut milk.. there is probably one exception to this but otherwise I use cans.. you can call it a western adaptation or you can call me lazy both would probably be true). Its the chakoah brand and Luckily its reasonably priced in the Indian grocery store (definitely not on Amazon), my husband doesn't like to use any other brand now.. and even I will admit that sometimes the quality is not the same.