Slow Cooker Beef Madras

A dark and deeply fragrant dish with a warm and spicy finish, Slow Cooker Beef Madras is a fantastic meal to cook if you are looking for something rich and satisfying for your fake-away night!

Origination of Madras curries

It’s fair to say that Madras isn’t a traditional Indian curry as the spice blend doesn’t actually originate from India and you won’t find it in traditional restaurants there.

Instead, the dish was reportedly first made in restaurants in the UK by combining ingredients widely used in the South East ‘Madras’ region of India (now called Chennai). So there isn’t one specific recipe that defines a Madras! Over time it has generally become known as a fragrant medium to hot curry with an sweet and sour undertone.

The great thing about this version of Crockpot Beef Madras is the balance of seasoning. Madras is supposed to be reasonably hot, but to make it really tasty too, it’s important that the heat doesn’t overpower the flavour. This ensures you can still taste all the elements in the sauce and the beef. After several iterations of this recipe, this is the one!

What are the ingredients in Beef Madras?

To create the intensely flavoured beef, and dark, hot and slightly sweet and sour Madras sauce, there are a number of key ingredients in the recipe:

• Tamarind – a dark and sticky paste derived from the fruit of the Tamarind tree. It adds the interesting sweet and sour note to the sauce. I used this Tamarind paste.
• Fenugreek powder – a highly fragrant ground spice derived from Fenugreek seeds. It is light in colour, has a soft and powdery texture and is a staple in Indian cooking. It really boosts the aroma of a curry. It’s now widely stocked in most supermarkets and specialist food retailers. I used this Fenugreek powder from Schwartz.
• Ginger – Fresh and zesty, ginger is a classic flavour in curries and goes particularly well in this recipe, adding to the hot and sour notes in the sauce. Try and use fresh if you can, but ground ginger will work too if that’s what you have.

Steps to make Slow Cooker Beef Madras

Making a Beef Madras curry in the slow cooker is simple! Start by preparing and marinading the beef, then searing it to release the flavours in the spices and kick-start the Maillard reaction.

Next, add the remaining ingredients to the slow cooker followed by chopped tomatoes, which form the base of that delicious curry gravy.

Add some curry leaves and red chilli pepper to suit your taste and that’s it – turn on the slow cooker and wait!

The end result is really intensely flavoured pieces of beef in a thick flavoursome sauce. Perfect for a fakeaway with very little effort.

Tips for an amazing Beef Madras

• Marinate. There are some dishes that really benefit from marinating the meat before putting it in the slow cooker and this is one of them. Beef is a strong textured and tasting meat and marinating it helps to achieve soft pieces of meat with heaps of flavour. The marinade in this recipe includes a blend of spices, tomato and a small amount of natural yoghurt. Whilst most madras recipes use a simple spice and tomato base and save the yoghurt for serving, I have added it to the marinade for two reasons; the lactic acid in the yoghurt helps to soften the meat, and it also adds a very slight sourness to the flavour profile.
• Sear. Once the beef has marinated, briefly searing it in the pan will release the flavours of the spices. This also helps retain the shape of the pieces of beef whilst slow cooking.
• Slow cooking. This is where the magic happens! The beef really tenderises and the spices and seasoning in the sauce fuse together. Over the cooking time you see the colour turn from a bright red to a deep reddish brown gravy covering the beef. The aroma that comes from the slow cooker is also pretty amazing!

How can I control the heat in my beef curry?

There are couple of options for dialling the heat up and down when making a beef madras curry. Here’s what you can do to tailor this recipe to exactly how you like it!

• If you prefer a milder curry, this recipe uses both chilli powder and a fresh red chilli pepper. Don’t add the fresh chilli.
• If you prefer a medium heat curry, slice the chilli lengthways, de-seed and add it to the curry before cooking.
• For a hot curry (as you would find in most restaurants), chop the chilli and add it to the slow cooker, complete with seeds.

When using fresh chilli it’s a good idea to taste a little of the chilli pepper before you start cooking, then you know how much heat you are adding. No two chillis are the same and can vary wildly in heat, even from the same packet!

To cool down a curry that is too spicy, stir in some natural yoghurt or coconut cream before serving. Citrus can also help, a squeeze of lime juice is a good way to curb the heat from a Madras without altering the flavour of the dish too drastically.

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