Italian Chicken Curry
Your new favorite 30-minute meal, straight from one of my all-time favorite restaurants in Florence.
This recipe may feel sacrileg from the get-go—Italian and curry in the same sentence?
I felt the same way when I re-visited one of my favorite restaurants in Florence last year, Trattoria Cammillo.
My friend Shawna and I were passing through Florence while planning our brand new Cinque Terre/Bologna Food Tour, and I wanted to show her one of my favorite spots to eat in town.
I’d had plenty of great things on the menu, including the tortellini alla panna and bruleed pecorino, but when I asked my friend Carlo what some of his favorite things on the menu were, he recommended the chicken curry without hesitation.
Chicken curry?
Yes, he insisted. A dish that Cammillo had been serving since 1950, when there was a large English community in Florence, and several of those expats longed for a delicious curry (thanks to the influence from its former British colony, India).
I adore curry and had no problem diving headfirst into Carlo’s recommendation.
And to my complete satisfaction, it was one of the best curry dishes I’ve ever had—reminiscent of curry dishes I’d enjoyed in India several years ago, but with a decadent Italian spin on the recipe.
It was aromatic, creamy, and I practically licked my plate clean.
A major bonus was the sweet mango chutney served on the side, which I later learned is one of their house specialties and a top-secret recipe they’ve been serving for decades.
Since I first tried the curry in October, I’ve been back again, this time with several women on our Tuscany Tour. I added this to our list of options for dinner and was thrilled to see so many of our guests fall head over heels for this curry, too!
This past weekend, I tried to recreate this dreamy curry recipe in my own kitchen. It was good, but I knew something wasn’t quite right. I decided to shoot my shot and ask my friends at Cammillo if they’d be willing to share the recipe. To my delight, they lovingly (and generously) responded with their curry recipe!
The recipe feels so endearingly old school to me, with instructions like “add a glass of fresh cream” and “quickly brown the chicken in a pan with a little oil”. I’ve taken their original recipe, made it in my kitchen, and written it out so it’s practically foolproof and super easy to follow.
Thanks for listening to my Italian chicken curry story, and next time you’re in Florence, make sure to stop by and grab an OG bowl for yourself at Cammillo (call ahead to make reservations)!
A Few Notes On This Recipe
When the team at Cammillo sent over this recipe, they instructed me they use a mixture of 2 different curries: madras and cannamela. For simplicity, I used a generic store-bought curry (that tasted quite similar to the dish at Cammillo), but if you have access to these curries, please use half of each.
At Cammillo, this dish is served authentically with a beautiful side of arbiorio rice (what we affectionately know as “risotto”). If you’d like to make the rice according to Cammillo’s instructions, I’ll share that here:
The rice is first boiled (in salted water) and drained ‘al dente’, it is greased with sunflower oil and in a baking tin, large enough to allow it to be 2 or 3 cm thick, it is placed in the oven at 400°F, until it is golden brown on the surface.
Lastly, the mango chutney, as I mentioned, is one of the hallmark portions of this dish. That recipe is completely top secret, so in lieu of what they serve at Cammillo, I recommend going to a gourmet grocery store or an Indian market and buying the best quality chutney on hand.
