Burmese Indian Style Chicken Curry Recipe for a Rich Fragrant Curry. Best Chicken Curry Recipes. Copyright © 2022 Terence Carter / Grantourismo. All Rights Reserved.

Best Chicken Curry Recipes for Spicy Curries from Southeast Asia and Beyond

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Our best chicken curry recipes include quick and easy chicken curries, low and slow chicken curry, a curried chicken pie, and braised chicken with curry gravy. Our curried chicken recipes are all fantastic chicken dinner ideas for mid-week meals in autumn when you want one-pot meals you can set and forget that are comforting, warming and can be shared.

This collection of our best chicken curry recipes is for readers in the southern hemisphere, where the evenings are getting chilly, who are looking for warming mid-week autumn meals to make. Why is it that once autumn (or fall) hits we’re searching for chicken recipes – whether it’s chicken breast recipes, chicken thigh recipes, chicken mince recipes, chicken soup recipes, chicken noodle soup recipes, sunday chicken dinner recipes, or chicken curry recipes?

Is it because we’ve learnt from the pandemic to always have some chicken in the freezer for those evenings when we just don’t feel like or can’t (!) pop out to the shops? Or is it because chicken can be so easy to cook compared to pork, beef and seafood?

It’s probably a bit of that, and so I’ve compiled some simple and quick chicken curry recipes below for those of you who are time-poor – along with recipes for chicken curries that would benefit from being cooked low and slow.

I think mid-week we’re also looking for one-pot set-and-forget meals that you can leave on the stove and give a bit of a stir occasionally, that are fuss-free and require little more than steamed rice as a companion. Another easy-to-cook dish if you have a rice cooker.

Chicken curries can also be shared family-style with pots of rice and curry at the centre of the table, or you can plate up individual dishes in the kitchen if it’s one of those nights when you all want to sit on the sofa and watch Netflix.

And if you’re cooking for one, chicken curry recipes are perfect. Make curry for dinner, set aside some leftover curry for lunch, and freeze the rest for another lazy autumn evening in when all you want to do is stick a bowl in the microwave.

But ultimately, I think chicken is so popular because it’s so comforting – chicken noodle soup for the soul? Tell me if chicken soup isn’t one of the first things you want to slurp when you’re sick – and there are few chicken dishes more soothing and more warming than chicken curries.

Our best chicken curry recipes come from all over Southeast Asia and beyond, from Cambodia, Myanmar, Thailand, Vietnam, and Malaysia, along with South Africa, from the Cape Malay community in Cape Town.

If you’re looking for more than chicken curry recipes, click through this to collection of our best 30 curry recipes for everything from fish curries to pork curries, curried noodles to curried soups, and curried meat pies and sausage rolls to our curried egg sandwich recipe.

Before I share our best chicken curry recipes, I have a favour to ask. Grantourismo is reader-funded. If you’ve cooked our recipes and enjoyed them, please consider supporting Grantourismo by using our links to buy travel insurance, rent a car or campervan or motorhome, book accommodation, or book a tour on Klook or Get Your Guide. You could also browse our Grantourismo store for gifts for food lovers, including fun reusable cloth face masks designed with Terence’s images.

Another option is to support our epic Cambodian cuisine history and cookbook on Patreon; or buy us a coffee, although we’ll probably use our coffee money to buy cooking ingredients for recipe testing; or buy something on Amazon, such as these cookbooks for culinary travellers, James Beard award-winning cookbooks, cookbooks by Australian chefs, classic cookbooks for serious cooks, travel books to inspire wanderlust, and gifts for Asian food lovers and picnic lovers. Now let me tell you about our best chicken curry recipes.

Best Chicken Curry Recipes from Southeast Asia and Beyond

Classic Burmese Chicken Curry Recipe

This classic Burmese chicken curry recipe makes a fragrant gently-spiced curry that is perfumed with turmeric, ginger, garlic, chilli, and lemongrass. A rich curry with a moreish tomato-based gravy and a layer of aromatic oil that’s quickly soaked up by coconut rice, it should be served with salads such as this Burmese potato salad, raw cabbage salad, and tomato salad.

If you could only make one of our best chicken curry recipes, I’d recommend this classic Burmese chicken curry or Burmese Indian style chicken curry recipe, below. They are equally delicious, if you’re a lover of curries. I’ve adapted these curries from my favourite Burmese cookbook, Mi Mi Khaing’s Cook and Entertain the Burmese Way, dating to 1978. It’s a delightful little booklet that is as much a historical document as it is a practical cookbook.

Unlike a lot of old cookbooks – not that the 1970s is so long ago – all of the recipes in Mi Mi Khaing’s book work and taste absolutely delicious. I’ve only tweaked recipes when I’ve not been able to source ingredients and if I can’t find them here in Southeast Asia, I’m guessing our readers in Australasia, the Americas and Europe might also face challenges.

Classic Burmese Chicken Curry Recipe for an Aromatic Tomato Based Curry

Cape Malay Chicken Curry Recipe

This Cape Malay chicken curry recipe makes a richly spiced curry from Cape Town, South Africa. Eaten with aromatic Cape Malay yellow rice, buttery roti, and simple tomato, onion and cucumber sambals, it’s an incredibly delicious curry that you’ll be sorry to finish.

Our advice: make double the amount, as it tastes even better as leftovers the next day. Our Cape Malay chicken curry recipe is inspired by the aromatic chicken curry we learnt to make many years ago in a Cape Malay cooking class in colourful Bo-Kaap, the heart of Cape Malay culture in Cape Town.

Gently spiced, the Cape Malay chicken curry is a cousin of the classic Cape Town lamb stew called tomato bredie. They’re dishes that locals here in Southeast Asia would describe as ‘same same but different’, sharing a lot of similar spices.

Cape Malay Chicken Curry Recipe for a Richly Spiced Curry from Cape Town, South Africa

Cambodian Chicken Curry Recipe

This Cambodian chicken curry recipe makes one of Southeast Asia’s most comforting chicken curries and is another of our best chicken curry recipes. This chicken curry is partly responsible for us falling in love with Cambodian cuisine as it was the first dish we sampled and an exemplary rendition of the Cambodian chicken curry.

This recipe makes a chicken curry that comes very close. While it has a depth of flavour that comes from dried spices and fragrance from fresh aromatic ingredients, it has a richness thanks to a liberal use of coconut cream and milk, and a gentle heat due to the mild red chillies.

Soon after we settled into Siem Reap, before we embarked on our own epic Cambodian culinary history research and began documenting local recipes for a Cambodian cookbook, we began cooking the chicken curry from Authentic Cambodian Recipes From Mother to Daughter by Sorey Long and Kanika Linden.

Although Terence has tweaked the recipe over the years, their recipe was the foundation of this recipe. We need to give credit to Long and Linden not only for the recipe, however… their cookbook was a fantastic primer for us when we first began learning about Cambodian food, and we highly recommend it, with a couple of qualifications explained in the post.

Cambodian Chicken Curry Recipe for a Gentle Comforting Southeast Asian Curry

Burmese Indian Style Chicken Curry Recipe

This Burmese Indian style chicken curry recipe makes a rich curry fragrant with ginger, turmeric, garlic and chilli that has a homemade Burmese curry powder on its concise list of ingredients. It’s the perfect accompaniment to Burmese coconut rice and the refreshing salads of Myanmar that provide contrasting textures and flavours, such as the Burmese raw cabbage salad.

This is another recipe I’ve adapted from Mi Mi Khaing, who uses a homemade curry powder blend, as most Burmese women do, which includes cumin, cinnamon, cardamom, cloves, coriander, peppercorns, bay leaf, and poppy seeds. We’ve shared her full curry powder recipe, but you could certainly use a store-bought curry powder.

Cooking the chicken pieces with the spices covered is crucial to keep the chicken moist and tender, but for the final stage you need to remove the lid so that the sauce can really reduce. Keep an eye on it.

Burmese Indian Style Chicken Curry Recipe for a Rich Curry Fragrant with Ginger, Turmeric and Garlic

Southern Thai Chicken and Rice Recipe for Khao Mok Gai

Okay, so this Southern Thai chicken and rice recipe for khao mok gai is not exactly a chicken curry recipe but it is close. It makes braised chicken cooked in a spicy curry-like gravy and served with turmeric rice and crispy fried shallots. A Thai Muslim specialty, it’s often called a Thai biryani or Thai style biryani. Like a biryani the chicken can be cooked with the rice or separately. Either way, it’s wonderful.

‘Khao’ means rice, ‘gai’ is chicken and ‘mok’ means to bury underneath or within in modern Thai. Interestingly, ‘khmok’ is also an ancient Khmer word that means to cook within banana leaves, which is how this dish was probably once cooked, and to find out more about that you’ll have to wait for our Cambodian cookbook.

The moist chicken pieces are braised in a wonderfully aromatic and rich curry-like gravy of dried spices that are served atop a yellow turmeric-tinted rice, and sprinkled with crispy fried shallots.

Depending on where you eat this addictive Thai-Malay street food favourite in Thailand, this Thai Malay dish might come garnished with crunchy cucumber slices or spears, and fresh mint, coriander and chillies, or the dish might be served with a fragrant relish or sauce of pounded herbs and cucumber – and/or sweet chilli sauce.

While this Thai Muslim dish is typically referred to as a Thai biryani or Thai style biryani, it’s important to note that this is not the style of biryani you might be familiar with from the Indian Sub-Continent or Middle East, hence “Thai-style”.

Southern Thai Chicken and Rice Recipe for Khao Mok Gai, a Thai Style ‘Biryani’

Thai Geng Gari Gai Chicken Curry Recipe

Easily another of our best chicken curry recipes from the archive, this old Southern Thailand geng gari gai aromatic chicken curry recipe “has a rich and delicious depth that only something rooted in the past can have,” according to chef David Thompson who taught the dish to participants at a culinary workshop in Singapore Terence attended some years ago.

This historic geng gari gai recipe is another “foreign” curry, according to Thompson, meaning that it was made using ingredients that fall outside ‘indigenous’ Thai curry paste traditions. In other words, it uses lots of dry spices from Burma, India, Persia, and the Middle East that travelled to Thailand with traders.

“Foreign curries, coming from the Muslim south or over the border from Burma, still have the hallmarks of their origins,” Chef Thompson explained. “Most traditional Thai curries have very few dried spices. Of course, they have dried chillies, but they do not have various things like coriander seeds or cumin seeds or cloves or other dry spices like that.”

The chef introduced this geng gari gai as a 120-year old recipe that he found intriguing because of the methods of preparation and marination. While he says that there are versions that are both simpler and more complex, this one had “quite an unusual combination of techniques that suggest the past; a greater complexity.” Which makes it another of our best chicken curry recipes on the site.

Geng Gari Gai Aromatic Chicken Curry Recipe from Southern Thailand

Vietnamese Chicken Curry Recipe for Cà Ri Gà

This easy Vietnamese chicken curry recipe makes cà ri gà, a gently spiced Vietnamese curry that’s made with Vietnamese curry powder, a dry spice blend, rather than the ‘wet’ spice pastes made of pounded fresh herbs, roots and spices of Cambodia’s kroeungs and Thailand’s curry pastes, above.

We’ve only started making Vietnamese chicken curries in recent years – despite having accumulated countless curry recipes since we first began cooking and eating Vietnamese food in the mid-80s.

When I first asked Terence to make this Vietnamese chicken curry after I became smitten with a gently spiced chicken curry that I bought from a mobile vendor outside a market in a Khmer neighbourhood in Saigon (Ho Chi Minh City), we expected it to be made, as the Cambodian chicken curry is, with a kroeung, a freshly pounded herb and spice paste.

While Terence was surprised to find Vietnamese curry powder on the ingredients lists of the various Vietnamese chicken curry recipes he tested out, there’s a fascinating history of curry powder in Vietnam.

Easy Vietnamese Chicken Curry Recipe – How to Make Cà Ri Gà

Chicken Curry Pie Recipe Made with Cambodian Chicken Curry

This chicken curry pie recipe uses the classic Cambodian chicken curry recipe, above, to make a flavourful spicy chicken pie. Unlike the classic curried chicken pie which uses curry powder to flavour the chicken filling, this recipe uses a classic Cambodian red curry paste.

The Cambodian chicken curry typically has potatoes, long beans and Asian eggplants, which we’ve included to create a really hearty chicken pie. For Terence’s homemade chicken curry pie recipe, he does exactly what he’d do if he was making a Cambodian chicken curry and uses coconut milk and chicken stock, which is cooked until the sauce is reduced until it’s very thick.

Terence makes a big batch of the chicken curry and saves some so he can make this homemade chicken curry pie recipe the next day, setting aside a couple of intact chicken thighs for the delicious filling.

Homemade Chicken Curry Pie Recipe Made with Cambodian Chicken Curry

We’d love to know what you think of our compilation of best chicken curry recipes from Grantourismo. Please do let us know if you make any and how they turn out.

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A travel and food writer who has experienced over 70 countries and written for The Guardian, Australian Gourmet Traveller, Feast, Delicious, National Geographic Traveller, Conde Nast Traveller, Travel+Leisure Southeast Asia, DestinAsian, TIME, CNN, The Independent, The Telegraph, Sunday Times Travel Magazine, AFAR, Wanderlust, International Traveller, Get Lost, Four Seasons Magazine, Fah Thai, Sawasdee, and more, as well as authored more than 40 guidebooks for Lonely Planet, DK, Footprint, Rough Guides, Fodors, Thomas Cook, and AA Guides.

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