My Boxing Day Colombo, Ready in 45 Minutes

It is the twenty-sixth of December and the fridge door will not shut properly. There is a plate of turkey under foil, half a bag of carrots, three potatoes nobody got round to peeling, a courgette that came home by mistake and the last two pigs in blankets. Everybody is still full. Everybody will be hungry again by six o’clock, and that is when I make my leftover turkey curry.

Back home in Guadeloupe, Christmas is not about turkey. The table belongs to the pig: the big glazed ham and the ragoût de cochon, with pois d’angole alongside. I wrote about what Christmas actually tastes like on the island if you want the whole picture. In England the turkey is the star, and with it comes the great English question of the twenty-sixth: what to do with the rest of the bird.

Sandwiches, yes, late on Christmas night. I am not against it. But by Boxing Day I want something hot and golden in a pot, and a cook from Guadeloupe has one answer to that. You make a colombo.

Colombo is our curry. It came to the island with the indentured workers who sailed from India in the second half of the nineteenth century, and the first of those ships, the Aurélie, landed at Pointe-à-Pitre on 24 December 1854. Every Christmas Eve there is still a ceremony on the quay to remember them. So a colombo at Christmas is not as strange as it sounds. Give or take two days, it is an anniversary.

I tell that whole story in how colombo became the national dish of Guadeloupe. Today is about the turkey. Cooked meat is a gift to a curry pot, because the long part of the job is already done. You build the sauce, cook the vegetables in it, and the turkey goes in at the end to get properly hot and drink up the flavour.

Let me show you how I make it.

Recipe at a glance

• Cuisine: French Caribbean (Guadeloupe)
• Prep: 15 minutes • Cook: 30 minutes • Total: 45 minutes
• Serves: 4
• Featured sauce: Caribbean Sauce Creole
• Heat level: 5/10, a gentle, rounded warmth, with room to go hotter at the table
• Diet: dairy free (check your stock cube). Not gluten free as written, because the Sauce Creole contains barley

What colombo powder is

Colombo powder, poudre de colombo in French, is the spice blend that gives the dish its name and its colour. It is a cousin of Indian curry powder but it is not the same thing. The usual base is turmeric, coriander, cumin, fenugreek, black pepper, mustard seed and a little clove, and many blends also carry a spoon of raw rice, toasted until golden and ground in with the spices. That rice is not only there for flavour. It thickens the sauce as it simmers, which is why a good colombo is velvety without any cream or flour.

A classic blend is mild, gentler than most Indian curry powders. It is earthy and warm, with a slight bitterness from the fenugreek. Most of the heat in a colombo comes from the pot, from a pepper or a sauce, rather than from the powder.

In the UK you can buy it online from specialist spice shops, but you will rarely see it on a supermarket shelf. So below is my quick version, made from spices most big supermarkets sell. Fenugreek is the only one you might need to look for: try the world food aisle or an Asian grocer. If you have a jar of ready-made colombo powder, use 2½ tablespoons and skip the first step.

What you’ll need

Start with the turkey. Brown meat from the legs and thighs is the best for a curry, because it stays juicy in a sauce, but breast works too as long as you keep the simmer gentle. Pull off the skin and throw it away. Skin goes soft and flabby in a sauce and nobody wants it. Then tear the meat into bite-size pieces with your fingers.

The vegetables are whatever the Christmas shop left behind. Potatoes and carrots are the backbone. In Guadeloupe a colombo often has christophine in it, the pale green squash you might know as chayote, and the closest thing in a British fridge is a courgette. A parsnip can stand in for a carrot without any fuss.

And the Caribbean Sauce Creole goes in with the tomatoes, early, so it has time to melt into the sauce. One honest note: the Sauce Creole contains barley, so this curry is not gluten free as written.

For the colombo powder (or 2½ tbsp ready-made)

• 1 tbsp long-grain rice (optional, for thickening)
• 1 tsp brown or black mustard seeds
• ½ tsp black peppercorns
• 2 whole cloves
• 2 tsp ground turmeric
• 2 tsp ground coriander
• 1 tsp ground cumin
• 1 tsp ground fenugreek

For the curry

• 2 tbsp sunflower or rapeseed oil
• 1 large onion, thinly sliced
• 4 garlic cloves, crushed
• 4 spring onions, whites and greens sliced and kept separate
• 4 sprigs fresh thyme, leaves picked (or ½ tsp dried)
• 2 ripe tomatoes, chopped (or 200g tinned chopped tomatoes)
• 3 tbsp Caribbean Sauce Creole
• 400g potatoes, peeled and cut into 1.5cm cubes
• 2 carrots, halved lengthways and sliced 5mm thick (or 1 parsnip)
• 500ml hot turkey or chicken stock
• 1 bay leaf (or a bois d’Inde leaf if you can get one)
• 1 whole scotch bonnet, left completely intact (optional, for aroma)
• 1 courgette, cut into 2cm chunks
• 500g cooked turkey, skin removed, torn into bite-size pieces
• Juice of 1 lime, plus wedges to serve
• Salt and freshly ground black pepper
• A handful of fresh coriander or flat-leaf parsley, chopped

How I make it

1. Make the colombo powder. Put the rice in a dry frying pan over a medium heat and toast it, shaking the pan, for about 3 minutes until it turns golden and smells like popcorn. Add the mustard seeds, peppercorns and cloves for the last 30 seconds. Tip it all into a pestle and mortar or a spice grinder and grind it as fine as you can, then mix in the turmeric, coriander, cumin and fenugreek. If you skip the rice, just crush the whole spices and stir everything together.

2. Soften the onion. Warm the oil in a wide heavy pan or casserole over a medium heat. Add the onion with a pinch of salt and cook for 5 minutes, stirring now and then, until it is soft and just starting to colour at the edges.

3. Wake up the spices. Add the garlic, the spring onion whites and the thyme and stir for 30 seconds. Then tip in all of the colombo powder and stir it through the hot oil for about a minute. The kitchen will turn yellow and smell like a market in Pointe-à-Pitre. If it starts to catch on the bottom, add a tablespoon of water and keep stirring.

4. Tomatoes and Sauce Creole. Add the tomatoes and the Caribbean Sauce Creole and cook for 2 to 3 minutes, scraping the bottom of the pan, until the tomatoes collapse and everything turns into a thick golden paste.

5. Vegetables and stock. Add the potatoes and carrots and turn them in the paste so every piece is coated. Pour in the hot stock, add the bay leaf and drop in the scotch bonnet whole if you are using it. Do not cut it and do not let it burst. Bring to the boil, then turn down to a steady simmer, half cover and cook for 12 minutes, until a knife slides into the potato with just a little resistance.

6. Courgette and turkey. Stir in the courgette and the turkey. Bring the pot back up to a gentle simmer, not a rolling boil, and cook for 6 to 8 minutes, stirring now and then, until the courgette is tender and the turkey is steaming hot all the way through. Break open the biggest piece to check. If you have a food thermometer, the middle should reach 70°C and stay there for 2 minutes.

7. Thicken if you need to. Colombo should be a loose, velvety sauce that coats the back of a spoon, not a soup. If yours is thin, press a few pieces of potato against the side of the pan with your spoon and stir them in. They melt into the sauce and thicken it in a minute.

8. Fish out the bonnet. Lift out the scotch bonnet and the bay leaf carefully. A pepper that bursts at this stage turns a family dinner into a dare.

9. Season and finish. Squeeze in the lime juice. Taste, then season with salt and plenty of black pepper. Leftover turkey was seasoned yesterday and so was your stock, so taste before you salt. Scatter over the spring onion greens and the coriander.

10. Serve it straight away. Take the pot to the table hot, with rice and lime wedges. This is a curry to eat today, not to keep for later, and I explain why below.

Making leftover turkey curry safely: the rules I keep

Christmas is when even careful kitchens get relaxed. The UK Food Standards Agency keeps its advice on leftovers simple, and this is how I follow it.

Into the fridge within two hours. Once the turkey is carved, cool the leftovers and get them in the fridge within one to two hours. Do not leave the bird sitting on the side all afternoon while everybody watches the film. Smaller portions in containers cool faster than a whole carcass.

Eat it within two days. The FSA says to eat leftovers within 48 hours, or freeze them. The clock starts when the turkey came out of the oven on Christmas Day, not when you make the curry. That makes Boxing Day the perfect day for this pot, and the twenty-seventh the last.

Steaming hot, all the way through. Not warm. Steaming. That is why step six asks you to break open the biggest piece and look.

Reheat once, and only once. This is the rule people forget. Putting cold cooked turkey into a simmering curry is its one reheat. So once the curry is made, eat it. Do not put the leftover curry back in the fridge to warm up again on the twenty-eighth. Cook as much as your family will eat tonight and no more.

If you have too much turkey, freeze the turkey, not the curry. Portion up what you will not get through in two days and freeze it as soon as you can. When you want a colombo in January, defrost a bag in the fridge, use it within 24 hours of it fully thawing, and follow this recipe as normal.

The role of Caribbean Sauce Creole in this dish

Leftover turkey arrives at the pot with nothing left to give. Its fat went into the roasting tin and its juices went into the gravy. When I make a chicken colombo from fresh, the meat builds the sauce as it cooks. A turkey colombo cannot do that, so the body has to come from somewhere else.

That is the job I give to my Caribbean Sauce Creole. Read the label and you will see that about two thirds of it is onion, with green chilli, a little vinegar and white pepper. Stirred into the hot spices with the tomatoes, all that onion melts down and gives the sauce the sweetness and weight you would normally only get from a long simmer. The green chilli brings warmth rather than fire. And the vinegar does what the lime does at the end: it lifts the whole pot, which matters a great deal after two days of rich Christmas food.

Turmeric and fenugreek on their own can taste dusty and a little bitter. The sauce rounds them off. That is the difference between a curry that tastes of spice powder and a curry that tastes cooked.

Tips from my kitchen

Tear, do not cut. Torn turkey has rough edges that catch the sauce. Neat knife cubes stay neat and dry.

Keep the simmer gentle once the turkey is in. It still has to get steaming hot all the way through, but it does not need a hard boil. A rolling boil shreds cooked turkey into strings, especially breast meat.

Use the carcass. If you boiled the bones up into stock on Christmas night, this is where it belongs. Turkey stock in a turkey curry tastes twice as much of itself.

Make a jar of the powder. Triple the colombo blend and keep it in a sealed jar away from the light. It does chicken, prawns and chickpeas just as happily. For the full Sunday version with fresh chicken on the bone, follow my poulet colombo.

What to serve it with

Plain white rice, cooked fresh while the curry simmers. That is how colombo is eaten in Guadeloupe and there is no need to improve on it. Long-grain or basmati, nothing added, so the sauce has something to soak into.

If you want to make it a proper plate, fry some ripe plantain the way I show you in bananes pesées. The sweet edges next to a golden curry are exactly how a Sunday tastes at home. A cucumber and lime salad on the side keeps everything fresh.

Put the jars on the table, too. The colombo is gentle by design, because on Boxing Day you are cooking for grandparents and children and the uncle who claims he cannot take spice. Anyone who wants more fire can shake a few drops of Caribbean Hot Sauce over their plate and leave everybody else in peace.

And if the day calls for a drink, I would pour a glass of rum punch.

FAQ

Can I make this turkey curry with raw turkey?

Yes, and it is a good weeknight curry all year round. Use 600g of boneless, skinless turkey thigh cut into 3cm pieces. Brown it in the oil first, lift it out, then carry on from step two in the same pan. Put the turkey back in with the potatoes at step five and simmer for about 25 minutes, adding the courgette for the last 7. It is done when there is no pink meat, the juices run clear and every piece is steaming hot in the middle. Because this version is freshly cooked, any leftovers can be cooled, kept in the fridge for up to two days and reheated once.

How long does leftover turkey last in the fridge?

Two days. The Food Standards Agency says to eat leftovers within 48 hours or freeze them. For the Christmas turkey, count from Christmas Day, not from when you make the curry.

Can I reheat leftover turkey curry?

Not if you made it with leftover turkey. Going into the curry was the turkey’s one reheat, so make what you will eat in one sitting. For curry later, freeze plain portions of turkey and make a fresh pot when you defrost one.

Can I use curry powder instead of colombo powder?

You can, and it will still be a good turkey curry, but it will not be a colombo. Many curry powders carry chilli. Colombo is built on turmeric, coriander, fenugreek and mustard seed, with that toasted rice to thicken it, and it tastes earthier and rounder. If you use curry powder, choose a mild one and use 2 tablespoons.

Is this curry gluten free?

No, not as written. My Caribbean Sauce Creole contains barley, so I cannot call this curry gluten free. Stock cubes can contain wheat too, so read the label on yours if you are cooking for someone who has to avoid it.

Final word from me

Christmas Day belongs to the turkey. Boxing Day can belong to the people who are tired of it. One pot, a handful of spices that came across the sea a long time ago, whatever is left in the fridge and a jar of Sauce Creole, and the bird gets a second life that tastes nothing like the first.

Make it on the twenty-sixth, keep the rules, and put the rice on while the potatoes simmer. Then sit down. You cooked yesterday. Today should be easy.

JP