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The British public has a new favourite curry and it's a disgrace

The Tikka Masala has been dethroned

The British public has a new favourite curry and it's a disgrace
Tom Victor
05 October 2017

When it comes to food choices, we’ve learned the British public can’t be trusted.

If we listened to the general populace, we’d all be eating mushrooms on our pizza and undercooking our toast.

And let’s not even get started on what the British people think counts as a pie.

Now they’ve gone and voted for their favourite curry, and we’ll at least give them credit for picking an actual curry and not just plain meat with rice. That’s all we’ll do, though.

According to a study from Just Eat, backed up by actual sales data from the takeaway delivery service, traditional favourite Tikka Masala is no longer number one.

However, if you thought that meant Brits were getting a taste for spicier food, you couldn’t be more wrong.

The public were asked to pick up to five ‘favourite’ curry dishes from a list of 30 - and the humble Korma led the way after being selected by 29% of those polled.

Nearly one fifth of curries ordered via Just Eat (18%) were Kormas, and it was the most popular selection in all but two of 16 UK cities for which polling data has been broken out.

People in Leicester preferred Tikka Masala, which ranked second over the entire UK, while Birmingham’s first choice was the Balti.

Balti - number one in Birmingham

The results are less surprising when you learn nearly half of Brits only know the names of two curries or fewer and only 4% of those polled were able to name six or more.

The voting patterns seem to reflect people’s desire to stick to what they know, prompting Just Eat to launch a ‘Curry Explorer’ with Curry Life Magazine in an effort to demystify some of the less popular choices.

Of the 16 cities highlighted in the study, every single one included at least eight of the country’s top 10 curries in its own top 10; the curry explorer aims to stop people ordering the same thing every time by providing recommendations based on what people usually like.

The Rogan Josh is one of the more popular curries in the UK

The UK’s 10 favourite curries, based on Just Eat’s poll:

  1. 1.Korma

  2. 2.Tikka Masala

  3. 3.Rogan Josh

  4. 4.Jalfrezi

  5. 5.Biryani

  6. 6.Tandoori

  7. 7.Balti

  8. 8.Madras

  9. 9.Dopiaza

  10. 10.Bhuna

(Images: Taylor Kiser/Rex Features)