Curry Toasties

We have been planning to have a curry toastie almost from the start, as Barny’s curry really is very good. Somehow though, it never quite tasted right. We had had a few tries, but in every case it feels like toasting didn’t add anything. A regular curry would have been nicer.
I think the problem is the toast. Toast and curry don’t sit comfortably together. So this time things are different, this time we are breaking with tradition and doing it in naan bread. The curry in question is lamb rogan josh, with smaller than average chunks of lamb.

Paneer Curry toastie

• Lamb rogan josh
• Paneer
• 2 slices of naan bread

Cheddar Curry Toastie

• Lamb rogan josh
• Cheddar
• Naan bread hollowed out

Taste
The goal was to establish if a toastie could be made out of a single slice of naan, hollowed out, or whether it needed a whole slice on either side.
Paneer is not an especially strong cheese, and holds its shape in cooking rather like halloumi does. It doesn’t do melting, which means that between two slices of naan it mostly works as a lubricant, allowing everything curry related to slither straight out the moment any pressure is applied. You need a dry curry for this, but the taste was bang on. 7/10

Cheddar in a curry toastie has the excellent melt that you expect, but doesn’t really work as a flavour. This one was inside the naan, so there was less escaping curry, but not nearly so much structural integrity. Naan is the way forward. This toastie with paneer would have been really classy. 7/10

Appeal
I don’t know how people would feel about this one. I’m hopeful that curry would be intriguing, but it really could go either way. It’s very good, and finally actually a worthy alternative to curry and rice, but would you eat it in a toastie? 5/10
Suitability as a signature
Curry is a very midlands dish. Despite this there are surprisingly few curry-based street food traders either in Birmingham or the surrounding area, which is strange. So perhaps if we swapped the rogan josh for a Balti this might actually be a good candidate for signature material. 7/10
Difficulty rating
Curry is not actually hard to make, but it is hard to perfect. I generously let Barny practise as much as he wants. On the other hand, if you have leftover curry from last night, I’d give this one a shot.
Summary
I like this one. We need to tweak the curry a little, and it would have helped if I’d had time to enjoy it rather than dashing out of the house for meetings all afternoon. This might well be joining the menu as a special, if we can find someone local who makes a great naan. Considering the number of curry houses in Leamington, that shouldn’t be a problem.