Chicken Korma with Riesling or Viognier

Leave those jars of yellow stuff on the supermarket shelves. This recipe will save you a ton of calories and help keep those sodium levels down no end. Sometimes it’s hard to beat a mild Korma. It’s great comfort food. Try making your own naan bread. We started doing this a few years ago and haven’t looked back since. Quite often we’ll just have the bread with it and a curried salady thing on the side. Jamie Oliver does a good one which you can see reproduced on his forum.

Chicken korma (serves 4)

Ingredients
25g butter
1 onion, chopped
3 cloves of garlic, crushed
2 inch piece of ginger, peeled & grated
2 tsp ground coriander
2 tsp ground cumin
1 tsp ground turmeric
1/2 tsp ground cinnamon
275g natural yogurt
4 free range chicken breasts, cubed
50g cashew nuts
2 tbsp fresh chopped coriander
basmati rice and/or homemade naan to serve

Method
Melt the butter in a large saucepan and fry the onion and garlic until soft. Add the ginger and spices and cook for a few minutes before gradually stirring in the yogurt, chicken, nuts and half the coriander. Cook on the low heat for around 30 minutes until the chicken is cooked through but still tender. Garnish with the remaining coriander and serve up with basmati rice or homemade naan.

The wine match

Notice not a single chilli in the ingredients above. That’s not like me, I know, but Korma is generally a mild dish anyway and that makes it a better suit to wine than many other curries. Try with a New World Riesling and you’d be surprised how well wine can go with curry. Take your pick between a dry style and an off-dry style. Ant Moore’s dry Riesling and that crazy off-dry Riesling from the Punks – Monsters Monsters Attack! are my two picks.

Away from Riesling, you could look at Gewurztraminer which will usually cope with a little heat if you like a kick to your curries. Otherwise, I would consider Tabali’s Viognier. Despite being a dry wine, it has a touch of fruit sweetness coming through, as well as a slight creaminess and a lick of spice. Undoubtedly a great wine match to mild Korma.