02.06.2016

Pataks Now In The Freezer Aisle

By Jo Cooksey

Patak’s is a go-to brand for the home curry cook, with its range of chutneys, pickle, pastes and sauces. They can even supply your dip, naans and poppadums. But what if you want something even simpler than that when you arrive home exhausted from work?

Patak’s have the solution. They are now manufacturing frozen ready meals that can be found in the freezer aisle of your local Tesco and cooked in minutes. These authentic, flavour-rich meals utilise Patak’s award winning sauces and spice blends, are generous in size and come in a choice of 6 delicious recipes. All are served with a separate pilau rice accompaniment in a handy, twin compartment, microwaveable and oven-able tray. In line with all Patak’s products, these super-convenient, cook-from- frozen curries are free from artificial colours, flavouring & preservatives

They very kindly sent us a selection and this is what we thought.

In general

Very often packaging tricks the buyer in to the thinking there is more enclosed within than is actually the case but these Patak’s curries do fill their generous containers. You won’t be left hungry an hour later after eating one of these. The packaging itself is easily recognizable as being from Patak’s. With each curry is a good sized portion of soft, fluffy pilau rice, which is helped to steam during cooking by adding a couple of spoonful’s of water. As a cook from scratch girl I rarely buy pre-prepared food but I would happily have a few of these in the freezer for the times when I really can’t be bothered. They certainly beat my usual standby M&S curry into a cocked hat and calorie and fat wise they are all around the 500kcal mark and around 1g of saturated fat.

Beef Madras

The chunks of meat in this Southern Indian style curry were a good size and there were plenty of them. I certainly didn’t have to play hunt the meat in this dish. The meat itself was very tender; the sauce rich and there was good amount of heat from the spices and excellent flavour from the cumin and fenugreek that is traditionally used in this dish.

Chicken Tikka Masala

Again, a decent portion of good-sized pieces of tender chicken within this dish. This is a sauce invented for the sensitive British palette and in this version the tomato and onion based sauce is more authentically Indian than the traffic light red, overly creamy versions you often find in restaurants and takeaways. A good blend of spices that pack more in the way of flavour than heat and no ‘funny’ aftertaste that often accompanies a pre-prepared Tikka.

King Prawn Balti

This sauce originates from the North West Frontier of Indian but the addition of seafood owes more to the country’s South. The main notes of this dish are a blend of tomatoes, onion, cumin and chilli. I love prawns, in fact all seafood and I know prawns are expensive and so less tend to get put in dishes than say beef or chicken but Patak’s version had a really good-sized portion. The sauce was very tasty. Not too much tomato that it drowned everything else out and a nice amount of heat from the chilli.

The other recipes are Chicken Korma, Chicken Vindaloo, and Vegetable Jalfrezi. All the curries will be available at a £2 price point for a 425g pack size.

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