Vindaloo Paste (Vinha d'Alhos)

Vindaloo has nothing to do with potatoes. The Hindi word for potato is aloo, so the folk etymology writes itself, and it is wrong.

Vindaloo is Portuguese: carne de vinha d’alhos — “meat in wine and garlic.” It was a shipboard preservation method, pork packed in wine-vinegar and garlic so it would keep on a long voyage. The Portuguese brought it to Goa in the early sixteenth century and Goan cooks adapted it — palm vinegar in place of the wine, and a whole spice paste added.

Which means the defining quality of a real vindaloo is SOURNESS, not heat. The British curry-house vindaloo — the one at the top of the heat ladder above madras — is a different dish that borrowed the name, kept the chili and threw away the vinegar. And it very often does contain potato, because the name suggested it should.

This is the Goan one. It is sharp, it is garlicky, and it is not primarily about being hot.

Ingredients

The vinegar — the whole point

• 3/4 cup palm vinegar (or cider vinegar; see Notes)

Dried chilies

• 12-15 dried Kashmiri chilies, stemmed and seeded — these are for COLOUR, not heat
• 4-8 hotter dried chilies (árbol, Guntur), to taste

The paste

• 2 whole heads garlic, cloves peeled — yes, two; the dish is named after them
• 2 in / 5 cm fresh ginger, peeled and sliced
• 1 tsp salt
• 1 tsp sugar or a small piece of jaggery

Whole spices, toasted

• 2 tsp cumin seed
• 1 tsp black peppercorns
• 1 tsp black mustard seed
• 8 cloves
• 2 in piece cinnamon or cassia
• 1 tsp coriander seed
• 6 green cardamom pods, seeds only
• 1/2 tsp fenugreek seed
• 1/2 tsp turmeric (ground, added at the end)

Directions

Key ingredients

Cinnamon · Black Pepper · Mustard · Turmeric

1. Toast the whole spices in a dry pan over medium heat 2-3 minutes until fragrant — cumin, peppercorns, mustard, cloves, cinnamon, coriander, cardamom seeds, fenugreek. Tip them out immediately, cool, and grind fine.
2. Soak the chilies in the vinegar, not in water. This is the step that makes it a vinha d’alhos rather than a generic masala — warm the vinegar gently, pour it over the stemmed, seeded chilies and leave them 20-30 minutes until soft. Keep every drop of that vinegar.
3. Blend the softened chilies WITH their vinegar, along with the garlic, ginger, salt and sugar, into a smooth paste. This is one case where a blender is the right tool — the vinegar provides the liquid a blade needs, so the usual objection does not apply.
4. Stir in the ground toasted spices and the turmeric. You want a thick, pourable, deep brick-red paste.
5. To cook it — marinate first, and give it time. Rub the paste thoroughly into cubed pork shoulder (the traditional meat; the fat matters) and refrigerate at least 6 hours, better overnight, up to 24. The vinegar is doing real work here — tenderizing and penetrating, exactly as it did in the ship’s barrel.
6. Then brown onions properly in oil — fifteen minutes at least, until genuinely browned, not merely soft. Add the marinated meat WITH all its paste and fry it hard for 5-10 minutes until the oil separates back out at the edges.
7. Add a little water, cover, and simmer gently 1-1 1/2 hours until the pork is tender and the sauce has thickened and darkened.
8. Taste for the balance at the end. It should be sour first, then hot, then sweet — a little jaggery pulls it together. If it tastes only of chili, something has gone wrong.

Notes

Kashmiri chilies are for colour This is the trick that lets a Goan vindaloo look ferocious and taste balanced: Kashmiri chilies are deep red and comparatively mild, so you can use a dozen of them for the colour and body and add heat separately with a few hot ones. The same move as using guajillo in Mexican cooking, or large mild dried chilies in a Thai red paste.

The vinegar Goan palm vinegar (or toddy vinegar) is the authentic one and is worth buying if an Indian grocer stocks it — it is softer and more complex than distilled. Cider vinegar is the best common substitute. Malt vinegar is wrong. And white distilled vinegar is harsh enough to bully everything else in the pot.

Pork, and why Goa’s Catholic population is the reason this is a pork dish in a country where most curries are not, and pork shoulder with its fat is what the recipe is built around. Chicken and lamb both work; with chicken cut the marinating time to two hours or the vinegar will start to cure the surface.

The name, one more time Carne de vinha d’alhos = meat in wine-vinegar and garlic. In Goa the dish is still called vindalho, closer to its Portuguese parent. No potato is involved traditionally, and if you want some in there anyway that is entirely your business — just know it is the pun and not the recipe.

And the chilies themselves arrived on the same ships Capsicum is American, and it reached Asia in Portuguese vessels in the sixteenth century. Goa is one of the first places in Asia where the chili and the vinha d’alhos met, which makes vindaloo about as literal a Columbian Exchange dish as exists.