Topic: Curry base sauce without onions !

[Peripatetic Phil]

Ever since discovering Kris Dhillon's The Curry Secret I have based all of my curries on her base sauce.  Over time I have come to realise that I can speed up the process by sauteeing the onions, garlic and ginger, and then pureeing straight from the saucepan rather than waiting for the mixture to cool, but just recently -- and rather serendipitously -- I discovered that I could make an extremely good base sauce with no onions at all !  I should explain that my wife is 3/4 Chinese, and so making Chinese chicken stock is a regular event in our home, and when this is destined to be used in (say) won-ton noodle soup, we add leeks and ginger towards the end of the preparation.  Normally these are then thrown away, but on the last occasion I suddenly realised that they effectively formed 2/3 of Khris Dillon's base sauce, so without further ado the leeks and ginger went into the blender together with some of the chicken stock, and were there pureed a la KD.  The results were most impressive : not only was the resulting curry just as good as any previous version, we now had effectively two dishes for the price of one : won-ton noodle soup stock, /and/ a KD-style base sauce.  Of course, this base sauce lacks one of KD's key ingredients -- garlic -- but that can be added later, virtually at any stage during the preparation of the stage-2 sauce or even during the preparation of the final curry, depending on how obvious one wants the flavour of the garlic to be.  Give it a go, and let me know what you think.

[Razor]

Hi Chaa,

Thanks for the post.

I'm a little confused though.

Normally these are then thrown away, but on the last occasion I suddenly realised that they effectively formed 2/3 of Khris Dillon's base sauce

What is it that you say forms 2/3 of the KD base?  Is it chicken stock, leeks and the ginger?  Obviously substituting the leeks for the onions?

Ahhh, I think I know what you mean.  This is stage 1 isn't it?  Sorry, I've never made the KD base in 2 stages, as I have a stick blender and proceeded with the "all in one version"

Chicken stock in a base has been mentioned on here before, and it's something that I would like to try one day.  My only concern is, if I was looking for the chicken stock to make a difference to the taste of the base, then maybe all the resultant dishes would have that same background taste?

Thanks for the tip though, that's what I call fusion cooking, lol

Ray

[Peripatetic Phil]

Yes, 2/3 of her stage-1 sauce.  I've never thought of combining stages 1 & 2, but it's certainly worth a try.  Incidentally, as I now make curries in relatively small quantities (at most two servings, sometimes just one), I no longer use pureed peeled plum tomatoes and simply use a decent-size squeeze from a tube of tomato puree.  For this evening's curry, made using 1/2 free-range chicken, I used half a tube of tomato puree, and that seemed about right -- not intrusive, just pleasantly in the background.