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National Curry Week: 8 best curry kits to help you make restaurant-quality dishes at home
Turn up the heat in the kitchen without forking out for endless ingredients
Everybody loves a Ruby Murray, don’t they? No longer confined to a Friday night, lots of us enjoy cooking up a spicy storm in the kitchen any night of the week – and increasingly we’re using specially designed kits to do so.
The cost, quality and ease of use of curry kits vary wildly, but their universal benefit is that it saves buying hoardes of different spices – which can be tricky to get hold of some cases – and hands you the perfectly measured amount of Kashmiri chilli, brown mustard seeds or fenugreek required for the recipe, with no waste.
Of course, keen cooks could spend a happy hour or two knocking up their own version of butter chicken or beef rendang using a stuffed store cupboard of spices, or at the other end of the spectrum there are supermarket pastes and sauces that will provide you with a middling jalfrezi in about 20 minutes, but these kits fall into a separate sphere where the curious can create dishes well outside of their comfort zone with very little fuss and almost guaranteed success.
To be considered a “kit” we were looking for at least two components, though some had many more, along with steps to follow and actual cooking to do.
Whether you’re after a quick post-work supper or are game for a veritable banquet, there’s a curry kit for that.
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How we tested
With more than a month of testing, 20 hours spent cooking and 28 different dishes, we’ve put the best to the test and these are our hot picks.
The best curry kits for 2021 are:
- Best overall – Boom Kitchen pick 'n' mix flexible subscription: £14, Boomkitchen.co.uk
- Best Sri Lankan curry kit – Hari Hari 6 pack curry kit: £20, Harihari.co.uk
- Best subscription box – The Spicery three month Indian restaurant favourites subscription: £26, Notonthehighstreet.com
- Best weeknight curry kit – The Spice Tailor fiery Goan curry: £2.95, Tesco.om
- Best for vegetarians – Hari Ghotra tikka masala: £3.50, Harighotra.co.uk
- Best for curry lovers – Scotia Spice chicken curry kit: £24.95, Scotiaspice.co.uk
- Best low calorie curry kit – Spicentice Malaysian rendang: £2.49, Spicentice.com
- Best value – Waitrose Cooks Ingredients massaman Thai curry meal kit: £3.50, Waitrose.com
Boom Kitchen’s offering stands out for the value, ease of use and the incredible flavours of the curries themselves, but the competition really was tough and we were impressed with all the dishes we tried during testing. Curry is such a broad spectrum, and while Boom Kitchen allow you to recreate Indian restaurant style dishes, we also fell hard for the Punjabi home cooking style of Scotia Spice, and the exotic and complex flavours we created using Hari Hari’s Sri Lankan dishes. For those willing to spend more and those truly committed to the curry cause, we’d highly recommend signing up to The Spicery, especially if you enjoy cooking for groups of people. Whatever your skills in the kitchen, the plethora of excellent curry kits mean it’s never been easier to spice up your life.
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