The Original Vindaloo
Food challenges such as belly-buster sundaes, six-alarm chili, and 32-ounce black-and-blue porterhouse steaks aren’t my thing. That’s why I had always sidestepped vindaloo, which I had thought must sit at the top of every culinary thrill-seeker’s list of favorite fiery Indian dishes. I prefer mild to medium-hot curries in which the painstakingly calibrated flavors of ginger, garlic, and spices haven’t been obliterated by searing heat. But it turns out that I had been mistaken about vindaloo, at least in its original form.
The scorching vindaloo served at many Indian restaurants in the United States and England is actually an offshoot of the original Goan version, which is composed of moist nuggets of pork braised to tenderness in their own juices and a fragrant paste of spices such as cinnamon and cardamom, mild dried Kashmiri chiles, and fresh ginger and garlic. Plenty of coconut vinegar (or sometimes tamarind) balances the rich pork, but the dish has little to no other liquid,, which are nearly identical to America’s soft, slightly sweet dinner rolls, are ideal companions. This sounded like a vindaloo I could get behind.
