Great Ingredients Make a Great Curry

Childhood Memories Influence Flavors of New Prairie Spicy Brand

Sep 14, 2009

A great curry depends on its ingredients, says Rubina Surtie of Prairie Spicy Foods.

Paying attention to ingredients has helped Surtie build her new Rubina's brand of sauces and marinates.

Childhood memories have influenced her business. She still remembers many of the tastes and smells of her family home in South Africa, and the various ingredients that went into family recipes.

She moved to Canada in 2001. Today, she will go to great lengths to recreate the most authentic taste possible. For example, she spent six months searching for the right chili taste for the sauces featured by her new company, Prairie Spicy Foods.

“Each region of India has a different taste in curries,” she explains. “The sauces that I have are predominantly Gujarati, which is my background.”

Searching Chili Samples for the Right Flavor

She had chilies brought in from Mexico, Hungary, and various other places, in her search for the right flavor. “I was looking for chili that tasted close to what I grew up with in South Africa. It was a sweetish strong, as opposed to the chili here, which is just hot, with no flavor to it.”

She looked for sources of chili that scored low on the Scoville scale, described by the Chile Pepper Institute of New Mexico State University as one common method of measuring the heat in chili peppers.

As she brought in samples, Surtie cooked each chili individually and tasted them, until she found one that was “closest to the one I tasted back home.”

She even went to South Africa and brought back some chili samples, and her mother brought some when she came to Canada to visit. They took the fresh dry chili, soaked it overnight, and ground it into chili powder. “I took it to the food centre and I said, ‘This is for the tan chi. This is what I need.’”

Then she spent several days in Toronto, tasting and considering various chilies they had in hand as well as what they could and ones they could bring in from elsewhere.

“I still have tons of samples of different types of chili companies would send me. And ultimately I did find what I was looking for. It was months.”

Of course, chili is not the only flavor she sought. “Curry is a combination of spices,” she points out. “It doesn’t mean just chili flakes.” She uses spices from Saskatchewan growers as well, including fenugreek from Emerald Seed Products, in Avonlea, Saskatchewan.

From Developing Curry Flavor to Building Brand Awareness

Finding the right ingredients and working out the taste was a real adventure, she says. “It was the most interesting part. The hard part is building brand awareness.”

The copyright of the article Great Ingredients Make a Great Curry in Indian Food is owned by Marie Powell Mendenhall. Permission to republish Great Ingredients Make a Great Curry in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.