Cook Like a Galarian: Recipes Inspired By Pokémon Sword and Shield

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Okay, trainers – let’s get cooking!

One of the signature features of Pokémon: Sword and Shield is of course the opportunity to go camping with your Pokémon – and cook them up a nice plate of curry and rice to restore their energy and win their undying affection. 

As described by an NPC called the “Camping Master,” who hangs out by the Motostoke entrance to the Wild Area, a Galarian curry is basically a sauce made from blended berries, served with rice and some other ingredient or topping.  Considering the range of different berries and other ingredients the games offer us, this can result in a number of things that – I would argue – barely qualify as food, let alone “curry,” but fundamentally the definition isn’t a bad one. 

“Curry” in the real world can be any of a huge variety of fruit-, dairy- or broth-based sauces, flavoured with spices (usually including hot chillies) and served with rice and vegetables or meat.  In the modern era, curry has spread all over the world from its home in India, and everyone now has their own idea of what it should taste like – especially the English and the Scots, and their Pokéverse counterparts, the Galarians.  Now, I don’t really have any useful skills or initiative, so while all the other PokéJungle writers are doing good work to write helpful guides about the new content in Sword and Shield, I thought I’d make some curry instead – and you can make it with me!

Today’s project: the “fried food curry”!

Sword and Shield’s “fried food curry” bears a lot of resemblance to the British fast-food staple of fish and chips* with curry sauce.  It is bizarre and, by the standards of almost any of the regional cuisines of the Indian subcontinent, an absolute culinary abomination, but as an example of modern British food it’s absolutely authentic.  In principle, you can have fish and chips with any kind of curry sauce – personally I recommend a vindaloo – but there is also a standard British fish-and-chip curry sauce.  It’s usually sweeter and less spicy than what we might normally think of as “curry” (which makes sense, since you use it the way you’d use a tomato ketchup); it features pureed apples and often raisins, and a lot of the spiciness it has comes from ginger. If you’re in the UK, New Zealand, or another country with a robust fish-and-chip tradition, it would sort of be in the spirit of this dish to just go out and buy some from your local chippie.  After all, in the game, the core ingredient of this curry is a box of last night’s awful greasy leftovers.  However, I believe in doing everything the hard way, so I’m going to do some beer-battered fish from scratch.  Here goes nothing…

* Note for American readers: in British English, “chips” are thick-cut fries, and the crunchy things are “crisps.”  Before you complain, know that in New Zealand, where I come from, we call both of those things “chips,” so if we can keep them straight, so can you.

Curry Fish and Chips Recipe

Curry Sauce:

  • 1 shallot or ½ a small onion, finely chopped
  • 2-3 cloves garlic, crushed or finely chopped
  • ½ an apple, peeled and diced (eat the other half, or don’t; I’m not here to judge you)
  • 2-3 cm fresh ginger, grated (1 tsp of ground ginger will do if you can’t get it fresh)
  • 1 tomato, quartered, with seed goop removed
  • 40g golden raisins (about 1 small handful)
  • ½ cup chicken stock
  • 1 tsp cornflour (= corn starch), dissolved in cold water

This version uses a little Worcestershire (inexplicably pronounced “whooster”) sauce, which is not a standard ingredient in this sauce and may be difficult to find in the US, but I think it adds a nice umami undertone, and it’s definitely a very British ingredient.

Spices:

  • ½ tsp curry powder
  • ½ tsp cumin
  • ½ tsp coriander
  • ¼ tsp cinnamon
  • ¼ tsp turmeric
  • (if you aren’t a crazy person like me, and you only have a few spices in your kitchen, cut the cumin, coriander and turmeric and just use a full teaspoon of curry powder and a little cinnamon)

Instructions:

  1. Finely chop shallot; peel and dice apple; crush or finely chop garlic; grate ginger.  Fry gently in butter or oil until the onions begin to brown.
  2. Add spices and stir for 30 seconds or so.
  3. Add chicken stock, tomato and raisins, then bring to a boil and cook until the tomato pieces are mushy.
  4. Add the cornflour, stirring vigorously to prevent lumps from forming.
  5. Remove from heat and allow to cool for a few minutes (you can start working on the fish and chips while you wait, if you like).
  6. Blitz everything in a food processor until smooth.

Fish and Chips:

  • 1 large potato
  • 100-200g fish fillets (I used cod here; at home we’d use snapper, orange roughy or tarakihi; you could also use tilapia, bass, trout, whatever’s available in your area)

Beer Batter:

  • ½ of a 355 ml/12 oz can of cold beer
  • ¾ cup flour, + another ½ cup for dusting
  • ¼ cup cornflour
  • 2 tsp garlic powder
  • 1 tsp salt

Instructions:

  1. Peel the potato and cut into long strips.  Bear in mind that these will shrink when fried, so don’t cut them too thin.
  2. Pat the chips dry with paper towels.  Try to remove as much moisture as you can.
  3. Cut your fish fillets lengthways into pieces 2-3 cm thick (unless they’re already thinner than that).
  4. Pat the fish dry as well.
  5. Mix the flour, cornflour, garlic powder and salt in a bowl.
  6. Pour in the beer, whisking gently until just combined (the beer is supposed to make the batter a little bit bubbly, so don’t stir too hard).
  7. Thickly coat your fish pieces in beer batter, then toss them in your extra flour.
  8. Fill a frying pan with oil to about 2 cm deep and heat it up to 170 ºC (= 340 ºF), then add the chips.  Be careful as the hot oil may spit.
  9. Fry the chips for at least 12 minutes.  If they start to turn brown, the oil is too hot – in this first fry, we only want to drive off as much water as possible.
  10. Once the chips have noticeably shrunk, remove the pan from the heat and take them out with a slotted spoon.  Put them on a paper towel-lined plate to drain, and use more paper towels to pat them dry (do this whenever you finish frying anything, otherwise the excess oil will make it greasy).
  11. Increase the heat to 190 ºC (= 375 ºF), then fry the fish until golden brown.
  12. Take out the fish, then return the chips to the oil for a quick, high-temperature fry (1-2 minutes) to get them golden brown and crispy.
  13. Liberally sprinkle the fish and chips with salt before serving.

Rice:

I’ll be serving all my curries with 1/3 cup of brown rice (which I prefer to white rice because it has more of its own flavour, but you should use whatever you have), boiled in about 1 cup of water with ½ tsp of salt, then drained and tossed with ½ tsp of turmeric to get the golden colour of the rice we see in the game.  The turmeric is purely cosmetic here, and if you don’t like the taste you can leave it out.

For extra Britishness points, splash a bit of malt vinegar over everything just before you start eating.

Fewer sparkles than the game version, and the curry sauce is a different colour (you could use smoked paprika instead of turmeric for something closer to the deep red of the game’s curries, although that would alter the flavour), but not a terrible imitation.

Of course, we have to give this a rating… drumroll, please?

I rate this curry: Milcery-class!

Frankly, the chips drag the dish down a bit.  It takes a lot of practice to get them right, and they should really be done in a deep-fryer (which I don’t have), so in my opinion there’d be no shame in doing this with some oven-baked potato wedges or something.  The fish turned out beautifully though, and I like combining sweet and savoury, so the apple- and raisin-based curry sauce is a great pairing with the fried fish and rice for me.  I probably wouldn’t make this if I were having friends for dinner, but next time I have a craving for fish, I’ll probably come back to it.

Other things you could try here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8RjV_hWit-0

The game dialogue recommends using berries with “dry” flavours to offset the greasiness of the fried food.  I’ve never quite understood what Pokémon means by “dry” flavours, because in English we normally only use “dry” to describe flavour when talking about alcoholic drinks (in Japanese, the word is 渋い, shibui, which is a difficult-to-translate word somewhere between sour and bitter).  However, the most common Pokémon berry with a “dry” flavour is the Chesto, which seems more like a nut than a berry, so you could experiment with some nutty flavours.  Instead of the raisins, try some hazelnuts, ground up in a food processor and then gently toasted in a dry frying pan (you may not need as much cornflour in this version, as the ground nuts will help to thicken the sauce).  Hazelnuts with apple and spices?  Call me crazy, but I think that might work.

Alternatively, the game doesn’t really specify what it means by “fried food” – fish and chips would be the classic, but I think anything you’d find at a neighbourhood chip shop is fair game.  Onion rings, pineapple fritters, battered scallops, calamari, the world is your oyster.  Oh, battered oysters; there’s another one.

If all that left you hungry for more Galarian food, join me next time as I tackle the most British curry of all: chicken tikka masala!

…assuming PokéJungle doesn’t just fire me for wasting everyone’s time with this nonsense. Let me know if you tried cooking it or want to attempt to make any other curries you’ve seen in-game!

For more Pokémon Sword & Shield discussions, go to our Discord server!

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96 thoughts on “Cook Like a Galarian: Recipes Inspired By Pokémon Sword and Shield”

  4. Ima be honest

    I was the biggest stan of camping during the hype season and I’ve got to say it’s not quite as fun as I thought. Like it would be cooler if you could move the camera 360 around your pokemon or get them to play games with each other. Because it’s literally just wiggle a feather and toss a ball :/

    Reply

  8. Btw pokejungle, this article was great! Please let pokemaniac chris write another! I’d love to know more about chicken tikka masala!

    Reply

  9. Seeing the Milcery in the article, it’s one of the few Pokemon that I didn’t like at first but grew to adore tbh.

    Also, takeaway chicken curry after a lazy night in is 👌

    Reply

  10. Blatant dig at British food is blatant. Not that I can blame you for that; it’s like how I make fun of what Americans are willing to call “beer”.

    Reply

  17. In regards of the article this is certainly worth a try, to be brutally honest even though my appetite is that of a Snorlax’s my pallet isn’t too fond of more… exotic foods like curry, most of them have the spicy flavor and odd texture which doesn’t agree with my system BUT with that being said i’m always a give it a try to see if i like it, i’ve certainly gotten my hunger up after making the food in game especially the burger, fried food and even the toast curries

    I’ve tried to make video game food before, i made some of Warcraft’s food items aka the classic Beer basted boar ribs and they were ok

    Reply

  22. Wow the wishing piece exploit really works wonders. In the span of like 15 minutes I’ve gotten 2 dittos that have perfect IVs between the 2 of them!

    Reply

  24. How do you guys pronounce Galar? No real reason behind this, just something I randomly thought of. I say Gah-ler (Sorry if my phonetic spelling is off), it just doesn’t sound right any other way to me.

    Reply

  26. Here’s a neat little thing I found out yesterday. G-Max Meowth’s is made sound like Meowth from the anime (Since it’s voiced by Inuko Inuyama, though she says “Meow” instead of “Nya”)

    Reply

  27. Finished the game today!

    This was my final team:
    Freezelle the Frosmoth, lv 63
    Soulette the Chandelure, lvl 63
    Rayn the Mantine, lvl 61
    Gnarly, the Grimmsnarl lvl 62
    Elloy the Copperajah, lvl 61
    Crispi the Appletun, lvl 61

    Soulette basically one shoted anyone after gym 8 and Rayn was surprisingly the mvp vs Leon

    Reply

  29. Internet communication is back up and I Got a max raid against ditto! This guarantees some perfect IV’s!

    My friend code is SW 7779 1032 9798

    I’d reccomend bringing Zacian/Zamazenta, as these ditto cannot Imposter/Transform into them but you dont have to!

    Reply

  32. So the portion of Curry you cook for your pokemon changes depending on the size of the leading mon, with bugs getting a spoonful, and Steelix getting a mountain of food….. except for one pokemon, Snom, Snom is very small but it also gets a mountain of food for some reason.

    Reply

  33. So I did a Dynamax Salazzle raid last night and whew her battle cry is terrifying lol and i realized both centiskorches i missed were G-MAX so theres that. Hoping the internet doesnt flub around again today so I can try and get some more raids done. Also… I just beat Bede at the mural and yet I really dont feel like I know the story outside of Sonia doing her research project on the heroes of Galar

    Reply

    • Savor that moment – it’s the last time the story takes itself seriously.
      (justification to people who’ve already beaten the game: I did thoroughly enjoy where Bede ended up, more so than any other character, but my goodness, did this scene set up so many interesting plot threads that the rest of the story just dropped… The eventual joke you get with him is genuinely funny, but it’s incredibly disappointing that none of the actual substance of his arc goes anywhere at all, especially after how interesting this scene set it up to be.)

      Reply

    • Again, the story is about you and hop doing the gym challenge and the people you meet along the way. The stuff about legendaries is a sub plot.

      Reply

  34. Honestly, Leon team was so strong and then they addedSeismitoad and Charizard?! Like charizard after gigamaxing is literally so weak

    Reply

  36. Does anyone who’s finished shield mind helping with completing the dex? I only need 8 more pokemon. We can trade exclusives back and forth, but i’d appreciate any help.

    Reply

  38. So I didn’t realize that I could actually reset the game if I failed to catch a Gmax mon and retry it, I thought that because it was an Online thing that it saved automatically…. D’oh!

    Reply

  39. Clash Avenue comic PSA (again): Post-Christmas, I will more than likely re-upload the pages and cover art to my ArtStation. I’m hoping to get some grayscale and colored markers. Characters will NOT be in color, however, their abilities and such will be (just a design choice I really liked that I saw another artist do). Everything won’t just be black-and-white anymore lol. Thank you all!

    Reply

  40. Yo, doing a starter ranking survey because I’m wanting to bring back the JungleDex project now that Gen 8 is out!

    Even if you don’t want to take part, it could be fun to take part just to see how the starters rank on jungle. However, I’d appreciate any help I can get with determining which Pokemon get into the project, and in this case it’s just as simple as doing the survey – no further commitment needed!

    For those of you who don’t know, it’s just a Pokedex of canon Pokemon I want to create purely off of Jungle submissions, for open use by jungle members for any projects they may be working on. It’s just a fun non-committal side thing really.

    Reply

  41. Okay the votes are in. With a result of 16-8 Grookey has won the starter poll and will be my starter in Pokémon sword! Will try and get started today when I’m more awake! I look forward to it!

    Reply

    • Nevermind, I see it… But yes, I say pick Grookey. When Aurora picked Scorbunny, causing Hop to pick Grookey and leaving little Sobble by himself it broke my heart… It was so sad, he looks around waiting for someone to pick it…

      Reply

  43. I think I have my three teams down…

    Inteleon, Corviknight, Thievul, Bolthund, Eiscue, Dragapult

    Cinderace, Dubwool, Galarian Darmanitan, Cramorant, Toxtricity, Grimmsnarl

    Rillaboom, Obstagoon, Sirfetch’d, Arctovish, Indeedee, Copperajah

    Reply

  44. Alright Corviknight has to go, one bulk up and it’s practically unkillable without a special attacker which ground doesn’t have anymore

    Reply

  49. So far i have
    3 Adamant Atk + SpAtk-
    3 Modest SpAtk+ Atk-
    2 Timid Speed+ Atk-
    4 Bold Def+ Atk-
    2 Impish Def+ SpAtk-
    1 Naughty for Monkey

    Reply

  57. Grass Starters

    1) Decidueye – 5.45
    2) Torterra – 5.2
    3) Rillaboom – 5.1
    4) Sceptile – 4.7
    5) Venusaur – 4.6
    6) Serperior – 4.5
    7) Chesnaught – 3.4
    8) Meganium – 3.05

    Fire Starters

    1) Infernape – 5.6
    2) Incineroar – 5.05
    3) Typhlosion – 4.95
    4) Charizard – 4.9
    5) Blaziken – 4.45
    6) Cinderace – 4.2
    7) Emboar – 3.45
    8) Delphox – 3.4

    Water Starters

    1) Empoleon – 5.85
    2) Greninja – 5.1
    3) Swampert – 4.7
    4) Feraligatr – 4.55
    5) Primarina – 4.45
    6) Samurott – 4.4
    7) Inteleon – 3.55
    8) Blastoise – 3.4

    Reply

  58. Well i’m done, i cannot do monotype anymore, ground is way too broken
    I just cannot deal with having no special attackers its impossible

    Reply

  59. So…you can’t use Honey to summon wild encounters anymore? It’s just to sell? Kind of a bummer. What about sweet scent? Anyone know?

    Reply

  60. Ranking characters based on story arc, design, and music theme

    1. Oleana
    2. Sonia
    3. Chairman Rose (mostly cause of his theme)
    4. Bede
    5. Marnie
    6. Melony
    7. Everyone else
    8-99. Even the NPC
    100. Hop

    Reply

  61. OK THERE FINALLY
    it has taken me a few days to catch all the nature dittos
    Adamant
    Modest
    Jolly
    Timid
    Impish
    Bold
    Careful
    Calm

    Now i can finally start hunting everstones and higher IV dittos

    Reply

  63. Really stuck on my last teammate for Shield.

    Velvet the Raboot
    Sage the Appletun
    Raven the Corvisquire
    Salem the Hatenna
    Mercury the Linoone

    Last slot candidates

    Neptune the Dracovish
    Pyrrha the Corsola
    Weiss the Frosmoth

    Reply

  65. There are so many things I can praise this game for, but I think my favorite thing thus far is doing raids with other people. It doesn’t matter if I have 12 of the Pokémon, I’ll jump in with just as much zeal at the thought of battling alongside some pals.

    Reply

  68. Managed to get High Jump Kick onto my Raboot (Velvet) by getting her son (Flint) to teach her it! They definitely didn’t have an accidental incest baby named (in)Zest that I’m headcanoning as an egg from the same batch as Flint that he helped look after with his mum until it hatched

    No siree

    Velvet is loyal to her husband, Hitmonlee uwu

    Reply

  69. After an afternoon of vigorous work I’m down to 59 Pokémon remaining on my Pokédex! The end is closing in. I asked Kurusu about this already but I’m looking for 2 Bird fossils and 2 Dino fossils from anyone out there. I’ll be happy to trade the Shield fossils in exchange. Later tonight I’ll make more progress and have a more definitive list of other trade requests but the fossils have been bugging me plenty.

    Reply

  71. Still havent found a pink shellos. I doubt this will work but maybe hatch location will determine the color? I’ll go hatch one in turffield and see what happens I guess.
    🙁

    Reply

    • Kinda, yeah. Visually and stat-wose, they’re the same. Just the lore is that the ones non-forgery teapot and teacups are much rarer. Plus depending on which you have, the item used to evolve Sinistea is different. Which is also the only way to tell which one is which

      Reply

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