R040Nadan Kozhi Curry
The everyday country chicken curry
Recipes › Chicken, Egg and Meat
R050
Mutton Stew
Attirachi ishtu — goat, white pepper and coconut milk
Photograph: Adobe Stock · representative of the dish
The re-engineeringThick coconut milk down from about 250 ml to 120 ml, and the vegetable weight raised to 400 g against 600 g of bone-in goat. Goat is the leanest red meat in the Kerala kitchen at about 2.3 g of fat per 100 g, so in this dish almost every gram of fat in the panel is coconut — which is where the reduction had to come from.
In central Kerala the Syrian Christian stew was made with beef or lamb before it was ever made with chicken, and mutton stew is the version that still turns up at Easter breakfast in Kottayam households. Kerala "mutton" is goat, not sheep, and that matters nutritionally: goat is leaner than lamb, leaner than beef and leaner than chicken thigh. If you have been avoiding red meat on a lipid panel and you miss it, this is the recipe to read twice.
Before you start: Have the thick milk measured and standing away from the hob, and the finishing pepper ground. The last ninety seconds of a stew are the whole dish.
Mutton Stew
Active 30 minutes Total 1 hour 20 minutes in a pot, or 50 minutes in a pressure cooker
Scale
4 servings
Ingredients — tap to tick off
- ✓10 g (2 tsp) coconut oil
- ✓5 cm Ceylon cinnamon quill, 4 cloves, 4 green cardamom pods
- ✓100 g (about 10) shallots, sliced
- ✓20 g (a 4 cm piece) ginger, julienned
- ✓12 g (about 4 cloves) garlic, sliced
- ✓20 g (about 4) green chillies, slit
- ✓20 fresh curry leaves
- ✓3 g (½ tsp) ground white pepper
- ✓600 g bone-in goat (mutton), in 4 cm pieces (about 420 g edible meat)
- ✓4 g (⅔ tsp) 70:30 salt (M07)
- ✓200 ml water
- ✓300 g (2 medium) potatoes, in 3 cm chunks
- ✓100 g (1 medium) carrot, in 2 cm rounds
- ✓350 ml second-extraction coconut milk (M08)
- ✓120 ml first-extraction coconut milk (M08)
- ✓2 g (⅓ tsp) ground white pepper, to finish
- ✓3 g (½ tsp) Kerala garam masala (M01)
Allergens: None of the major allergens.
Equipment: Pressure cooker or heavy lidded pot, 4 litre. Substitute: a pot works and takes an extra half hour; goat is tougher than lamb and rewards the time either way.
Per serving (estimated)
| Energy | 364 kcal |
| Protein | 26 g |
| Fibre | 5 g |
| Net carbohydrate | 21 g |
| Total carbohydrate | 26 g |
| Sugars | 6 g |
| Fat | 19 g |
| Saturated fat | 15 g |
| Sodium | 400 mg |
From ICMR-NIN IFCT 2017 and USDA FoodData Central. Per-serving figures stay the same when you scale.
Method — tap a step to mark it done, tap a time to start a timer
- Heat the oil in the cooker over medium-low, add the whole spices, and wait 45–60 seconds until they smell sweet.
- Add the shallots, ginger, garlic, green chilli and curry leaves. Cook until the shallots are soft and translucent but have taken no colour, . As with R041, browning here turns the stew grey.
- Stir in the 3 g of white pepper for 30 seconds. Add the goat and salt and turn until the surfaces are opaque, .
- Add the water. Pressure-cook at full pressure and release naturally; or cover and simmer , until a piece pulls from the bone with a fork but still holds its shape.
- Add the potato, carrot and second-extraction milk. Simmer, uncovered or loosely covered, until the potato is completely tender and the liquid has thickened slightly, . Under pressure, is enough and the potato will be soft.
- Take off the heat and stand for . Add the first-extraction milk around the edge, the finishing white pepper and the M01, swirl the pan, and return to the barest heat for 60–90 seconds only.
- Rest covered . Mutton stew improves visibly in that time as the gravy tightens.
Why this worksGoat's leanness is the reason this stew needs the bone. With little intramuscular fat to melt, body has to come from gelatine, and gelatine comes from the connective tissue around the bone and from the collagen in a working shoulder. That is also why the meat is cooked before the vegetables go in: potato held for 25 minutes under pressure disintegrates, and its starch would cloud the pale gravy this dish is prized for.
Sourcing note
Ask for shoulder and neck on the bone, which give the best stew, rather than leg, which is leaner but drier. Outside India, goat is sold at halal butchers, Caribbean and West African grocers and most South Asian shops; lamb shoulder is the nearest substitute and carries roughly three times the fat, so if you use it, trim hard and drop the coconut oil to 5 g.
If you are watching…
Blood sugar: 21 g of net carbohydrate, nearly all of it potato. This is a stew with a starch already in it, so treat it as such: appam or rice in a smaller quantity than usual, or swap half the potato for ash gourd, which is 2.84 g of available carbohydrate per 100 g against potato's 15.4 g.
Blood pressure: 400 mg, the highest of the coconut-milk dishes here, partly because goat itself carries about 82 mg of sodium per 100 g. Three grams of M07 brings it to about 345 mg.
Cholesterol: 15 g of saturated fat, and about 13 g of that is coconut milk. The meat contributes roughly 0.7 g per serving. If you take one thing from this chapter, take this: in Kerala's coconut-milk dishes, the meat is rarely the saturated fat.
Swap it
Lamb shoulder → trim hard, drop the oil to 5 g, and expect about 6 g more fat per serving.
Beef → 600 g of chuck, pressure-cooked 25–30 minutes at step 4. About 5 g more fat per serving.
Half the potato replaced with ash gourd or green plantain → net carbohydrate to about 14 g. Ash gourd is the bigger drop; plantain keeps more of the stew's body.
No first-extraction milk at all → 300 kcal and 11 g of saturated fat per serving, and a thinner, cleaner stew that is still worth eating. This is the version to make if a lipid panel is the concern.
Make ahead · store · freeze
Cook to step 5 up to a day ahead and finish with the thick milk on the day; this is how a Kottayam kitchen gets stew onto the table at seven in the morning. Fridge 2 days. Freeze 1 month at step 4, before the potato and before the thick milk. Reheat below a simmer.
Leftovers
Pull the meat off the bones, mash the potato into the gravy, and it becomes a thick ishtu to eat with pathiri. Or thin it with second milk into a soup with more vegetables.
Troubleshooting
Grey, cloudy gravy: the shallots browned, or the potato went in too early and broke up.
Meat still tough after the full time: older goat needs longer. Another 10 minutes under pressure, and check again.
Split gravy: the thick milk boiled, or the cooker was still under residual pressure when the milk went in. Release fully, stand a minute, then add.
Serve with
R001 Appam · R007 Thattu Dosa · R062 Sprouted Moong Salad · R107 Sambharam
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