Mains
Slow Cooker Chicken Curry
BY Monica Yates
This chicken curry was so healing. It was raining and cold outside when I was eating this and I seriously couldn’t have asked for something more nourishing. The healthy fats from the coconut milk combined with the buttery chicken skin seriously make for an orgasmic mouthful. The trick in this recipe is to have the skin facing up and to not cover the skin with the broth. Having the skin just out of the broth allows it to firm up a bit, whilst still being super buttery and delicious.
Cooking with the additional parts of the chicken (ligaments, bone, skin, cartilage) creates more nutrition. Water molecules tug apart the connective tissue in the skin, ligaments, cartilage and even bone, releasing a special family of molecules called glycosaminoglycans. The three most famous members of this family – glucosamine, chondroitin, sulfate and hyaluronic acid in nutritional supplements for joints. Also, cartilage, skin etc are nearly flavourless before slow-cooking before (just as with muscle) the huge glycosaminoglycan molecules are too big to fit into our taste bud receptors. After slow cooker, many amino acids and sugars are cleaved away fro the parent molecule. Once they are released, we can taste them! Mineral salts are also released from the bone and cartilage as well as the meat itself. These tissues are mineral warehouses that are rich in calcium, potassium, iron, sulfate, phosphate and sodium and chloride.