Last Updated on May 11, 2026
Master the art of curry making with Kokum
We spent a sunny afternoon in East Dulwich learning the ins and outs of heavy-duty Indian cooking at Kokum. Clearly, it has become a little bit of a trend for chefs and restaurants to open up their kitchens and reveal their secrets in cookery courses. A few places are now offering this experience, including Bluebird. Kokum in East Dulwich has also recently joined the party, offering a range of cookery courses including a street food, Indian bread and curry workshop.
We attended the curry workshop, which was run by Kokum’s head chef, Sanjay Gour, who, after leaving Mumbai, has worked in some of London’s top restaurants, including Gymkhana and Murano. This course promised to teach us the basics of a bone-in chicken curry, one of the restaurant’s most used bases for their dishes.
As Sanjay explained, the aim of the course is not to teach one specific recipe, although we were sent home with a nifty recipe card as a reminder, but to teach the skills of curry making so that you can make it home by ear.
We started with instruction and the opportunity to butcher a chicken, while the French have the method you will be used to from your butcher’s. This method resulted in smaller pieces that promised to cook evenly. We then bloomed our whole spices in oil, with the choice to choose and pick which ones we wanted and then softened an enormous volume of onions, the real secret to a good curry.
Only once these onions were golden, which I was tasked with achieving armed only with a roaring gas stove and a large metal spoon that left me with a blister from the heat and stirring (I’ll live, but only just), could we add the blitzed garlic and ginger and the rest of the spices, which, aside from salt and chilli, we could choose ourselves. These were all held in a masala dabba, a metal tin with individual compartments for easy access to each spice. Then the chicken and blitzed tinned tomatoes were added.
This base could then be used in the southern Indian style with fried mustard seeds and curry leaves or made fruity and silky with coconut milk and double cream, or made earthy and meaty with spinach and methi, dried fenugreek leaves. By the end, Sanjay had shown us how to turn this base into five different curries. With a restaurant’s access to ingredients, it looked effortless, but at home, one curry would probably be enough.
In fact, I did attempt a recreation at home based on my notes, the recipe card we were given, along with the spices we received at the end, as well as Kashmiri chilli powder, methi and garam masala. It was a hearty meal, but I’m still quite at the level to take a job at Kokum quite yet, for one thing, I’m still recovering from my blister.
Sanjay also gave us a foolproof method for boiling rice. If you’re like me, then you may have burnt a few pans of rice in your time using the absorption method, involving mugs and tea towels with the heat off. Sanjay’s recommendation, which coming from him, gives me the confidence to give up on the previous method: to boil the rice essentially like pasta, in a large amount of water until it ‘dances’ at the top of the pot.
We also got to learn how to make a Punjabi fried fish dish from Amritsar. We used tilapia, but apparently, the traditional river fish caught and eaten in the afternoons in Amritsar is a little meatier. We learnt how to slice the fillets, marinate them and toss them in corn and rice flour before they were deep fried and served with green chutney and a lemon wedge. Crisp and buttery, these were a delight, and a dish we could take home that wouldn’t take 3 hours at the stove.
It was fascinating to learn how restaurants like Kokum use their kitchens and such a wide variety of ingredients to build depth of flavour in their curries, while the skills we learnt would need a little adaptation to work in a home kitchen, while avoiding waste, Sanjay and his team were alert and expert in their field, with many interesting and useful insights into the making of curries.
Kokum is running cookery classes from April through to August.
Kokum 58-60 East Dulwich Road, Southwark, SE22 9AX
02035511883
Book here
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