Easy Slow Cooker Beef Curry

This easy slow cooker beef curry took me under 5 minutes to “prepare”, then 6 hours later I was eating it! Fix and forget at its finest!

A lot of recipes are overly complicated, but there’s absolutely no shame in using a jar of sauce to make an easy slow cooker beef curry.  Indeed, why buy a lot of spices you may only use 1-2x a year (or less), just to create something that’s taken a lot of effort, when a jar of sauce simply hits the spot?  Slow cooker curry sauces for beef are sold in every supermarket, but don’t feel overwhelmed, just pick one that catches your eye – only you can judge if you like it and these days they’ve all been extensively taste-tested, so the chances of picking one you don’t like are slim.

Life isn’t a competition – and neither is cooking.  It’s OK to use a jar of sauce!  Slow cooker curry sauces for beef simply mean you don’t have to buy lots of individual spices (and get stuck with them). Each time I visit my sibling I tend to get “gifted” a random jar of sauce.  I’ve never been one for buying jars of sauces as I do just make my own – and, there are too many on the shelves to even start to choose from!

The jar of sauce I was gifted was a Waitrose Low Fat Biryani Sauce.  I must’ve been gifted this as my sibling’s diet finished 🙂

I love biryani and I did wonder if this would give me that authentic restaurant taste.  But, I equate biryani with chicken – and I’d bought beef as part of the Lidl Pick of the Week deal, as well as a large red pepper.   This week I wanted to cook the sort of curry that is just meat in curry sauce, not one that’s stuffed with lots of vegetables and ingredients.  

So, what’s one to do?  Well, my basic rule of cooking is: ignore what seems to be the norm.  I had a jar of perfectly good Waitrose Low Fat Biryani Sauce and I had 400 grams of beef and a red pepper from Lidl.   The beef and the pepper needed cooking and if I didn’t use the jar of sauce then it’d continue to languish in the cupboard – and so I went for it!

The jar never said it was for slow cooker use, but never let that stop you!  It’s a jar of curry sauce and the side of the jar said to mix it with cooked chicken and put it in the oven for a couple of hours.  So that’s ideal for the slow cooker, with just a longer cooking time!

Here’s this easy slow cooker beef curry recipe (is it a recipe when you open a jar?):

Beef Curry (serves 2)

• 200 grams lean cubes of beef (or any meat really)
• 1 large red pepper, deseeded and sliced/cut into smaller pieces
• 1 350 gram jar of curry sauce that catches your eye in the shops.

You can add more beef if you want, I actually added the whole 400 grams because that prevented me from worrying about what to do with the other half of the pack.

1 350gram jar of curry sauce serves two portions.

If you want to make this for four people then use 400 grams of meat and two jars of sauce.

Method:

1. Tip the raw meat into the slow cooker
2. Tip the sliced red pepper into the slow cooker
3. Tip the entire jar of sauce into the slow cooker
4. Turn the slow cooker on for one hour on HIGH, then five hours on LOW, or seven hours on LOW.

I served my beef curry with some basmati rice that I’d steamed in the microwave, I always cook rice in the microwave as it’s easy to do and, for me, makes just enough for two portions.  That’s one today and one tomorrow!

Review:

I did make a ‘mistake’ in using 400 grams of beef with just one jar of sauce as this jar isn’t overly large.  At just 350 grams, it is a little smaller than many other jars of curry sauce, which can be 500 grams.   However, the taste wasn’t impaired, I just had a lot of meat, rather than meat swimming in sauce.

The beef was on the verge of really falling apart, which is ideal as I do like to be able to spear chunks of beef with a fork, then have it melt in my mouth!

Taste-wise it was a lovely taste; I’d certainly eat it again, but it was in no way, in my opinion, anything like a biryani taste from an indian restaurant.  This wasn’t in any way a hot curry at all.  I’d say it was a mild-to-medium.

Nutrition (as if I care!):

For the record, here are the ingredients in the Waitrose Low Fat Biryani curry sauce, which is suitable for vegetarians:

CHOPPED TOMATOES (38%) (tomatoes, tomato juice), onion, water, yogurt (milk)(5%), tomato paste (3%), garlic purée, rapeseed oil, ginger purée, green chilli purée, coriander powder, cumin powder, coriander leaf, salt, onion powder, dried mint, acidity regulator citric acid, cornflour, turmeric, dried fenugreek leaf, cinnamon, ginger powder, chilli powder, black pepper, clove powder, nutmeg, mace, cardamom powder, bay leaf