Gordon Ramsay’s turkey curry turns leftover Christmas turkey into a fragrant coconut curry built on a blitzed lemongrass and ginger paste, with mixed green vegetables, ready in 35 minutes. The turkey goes in already cooked, so it only simmers long enough to heat through.
The recipe is published on his official Gordon Ramsay Restaurants site, but he first taught it on The F Word, showing prisoners on a catering course what to do with unwanted Christmas turkey. His opening line says it all: “the best thing about Christmas, of course, the food. The worst thing about Christmas, the leftovers.”
Everything rides on the paste, because there’s no slow cooking to build flavour afterwards. Lemongrass, ginger, chilli, garlic, shallot and garam masala get blitzed with oil and fried hard for 2 to 3 minutes before anything else, which is where all the depth in a 35-minute curry comes from.
Gordon Ramsay’s Leftover Turkey Curry
Course: DinnersCuisine: ThaiDifficulty: Easy4
servings15
minutes20
minutes490
kcal35
minutesThe official Gordon Ramsay Restaurants leftover turkey curry: a blitzed lemongrass and garam masala paste, coconut milk, and whatever green veg your fridge is holding, on the table in 35 minutes.
Ingredients
- For the curry paste:
1 lemongrass stalk, bashed with the back of a knife and roughly chopped
25g (1 oz) fresh ginger, peeled and roughly chopped
1 red chilli, roughly chopped
3 garlic cloves, peeled
1 shallot, peeled and roughly chopped
2 tbsp garam masala
2 tbsp olive oil
- For the curry:
2 tbsp olive oil
1 onion, finely sliced
1 x 400ml (14 fl oz) tin coconut milk
1 tbsp soy sauce
150g (5.5 oz) mixed green vegetables, such as mangetout (snow peas), green beans, broccoli tips and spinach
400g (14 oz) leftover cooked turkey, shredded or sliced
Small bunch of coriander, chopped, plus sprigs to garnish
Juice of 2 limes, plus wedges to serve
1 red chilli, sliced, to garnish
Directions
- Blitz the paste: Put the lemongrass, ginger, chilli, garlic, shallot, garam masala and 2 tablespoons of oil in a small food processor and blitz to a rough paste.
- Fry the paste: Heat the remaining oil in a deep frying pan or wok over high heat. Add the paste and fry for 2 to 3 minutes, stirring, until fragrant.
- Soften the onion: Add the sliced onion and cook for 5 minutes until softened.
- Build the sauce: Pour in the coconut milk and soy sauce, add the mixed green vegetables, and stir well.
- Warm the turkey through: Stir in the leftover turkey and simmer gently for 10 minutes until piping hot all the way through.
- Finish and serve: Stir through the chopped coriander and lime juice. Divide between bowls and garnish with coriander sprigs, lime wedges and sliced red chilli. Serve with steamed rice, naan or noodles.
Notes
- The 10-minute turkey simmer is a heat-through, not a cook. Add it any earlier and already-cooked meat turns stringy.
FAQs
How long does leftover turkey keep before going in a curry?
Two days in the fridge, that’s the FSA’s window, so Boxing Day and the day after are your slots for this curry. Cool the turkey within a couple of hours of carving, get it covered and chilled, and it waits for you.
If two days isn’t enough, freeze the stripped meat on day one instead, then defrost it fully in the fridge before it goes near the pan. Either way, that 10-minute simmer has one job beyond flavour: getting meat that’s on its second cooking piping hot right through.
Where does this recipe come from?
The written version lives on his official Gordon Ramsay Restaurants site, but the story behind it is better. On The F Word, he took it into a prison that runs a catering course for inmates, because as he put it, curry is the most popular dish in the prison, and he taught four of them to rescue their Christmas leftovers with it.
That’s also why it’s built the way it is: cheap, fast, forgiving, and made from whatever the kitchen already holds. The whole segment is worth watching on YouTube, including a knife-skills race he very nearly loses.
Does the paste or the onion go in first?
His own two versions disagree, which I’m flagging because you’ll run into both. The official written recipe fries the paste first, then softens the onion in it. In the F Word video he fries the onions first and adds the paste after.
I follow the written version since it’s the one he published, and the hard paste-fry builds more depth in less time. Either order works though, and the paste is the constant, he even says in the video it’s “great if you’re making a fish curry.” It’s the same blitz-and-fry logic behind his Thai red curry paste, just with garam masala doing the heavy lifting instead of dried chillies.
Can I make it with chicken, prawns or paneer instead?
Yes, and this comes straight from his own tips on the recipe page: leftover chicken from a Sunday roast works equally well, prawns turn it into a fish curry, paneer makes it vegetarian, and extra vegetables make it vegan. The method doesn’t change, only the simmer does.
Raw prawns need just 3 to 4 minutes in the sauce, and paneer wants a quick fry first so it holds its shape. And if you’d rather build a chicken curry from raw as the main event, his chicken and butternut squash curry uses a grating trick that thickens the sauce by itself.
What rice goes with turkey curry?
The official page says steamed rice, naan or noodles, but the video has a trick worth stealing. In the prison kitchen he crumbled a block of creamed coconut through the hot cooked rice, then stirred chopped coriander through it.
The coconut melts into the grains and turns plain rice fragrant and slightly sticky, or in his words on camera, it “makes a really nice fragrant rice.” A block of creamed coconut costs pennies and sits in the world foods aisle of any UK supermarket.
Can you freeze and reheat turkey curry?
Yes to both, with rules. In the fridge it keeps 1 to 2 days at most, not the usual 3, because the turkey inside is already a day or two old before it ever meets the sauce. For longer, freeze it the same day you make it and it holds for 2 months.
Reheat it once only, piping hot all the way through, and stir the sauce back together over gentle heat if the coconut has split. Don’t hold it warm in a slow cooker either, hours of heat wrecks meat that’s already been cooked twice. And once the leftovers are dealt with, my roundup of his curry recipes ranks every one of them for the rest of the year.
