the chod: That sounds like pre-cooked onions which a lot of restaurants use. It should be a bit similar to this recipe, but have bigger chunks of onion, and perhaps not cooked as long.

A note on the disintegration of the onions etc, the pic on the first page of the finished paste has huge(well relatively) onion bits in it. If you just finely chop (4-5mm squares or so) normally then you will get a smooth creamy sauce without those bits. The only hint of chunkiness I've had in my batches were from the tomatoes, which are a bit harder to finely chop. I like the fact that I don't have to bust out my hand blender for this recipe.

Mark, I'm not sure what your no turmeric in the recipe is in reply to, if it was to me then I didn't say anything about turmeric, so I'm a bit puzzled..

I unfroze the last bags I had in the freezer a couple of days ago and made probably the best curry I've ever made, just adding some chopped onions and red peppers along with some tandoori masala and Kushi spice mix. You are definitely right about the freezing/unfreezing, it's great. The texture you get with this base is perfect imo.

I'm not sure I remember exactly what I did with the spices for my batch, I know I added at least 1 extra tablespoon of ginger/garlic paste to start with but I think it was halving the cumin and garam masala and added about a tablespoon of Kushi spice mix and maybe a pinch of methi seed powder instead of using the kasoori methi. I might also have dialed back slightly on the chili powder since I'm not a huge fan of super hot curries, and I prefer to have a milder base that I can adjust with chili powder when cooking the dishes. I do sort of wish I had written down what I did because the hotness was just right with what I did. Do you find the 1 tablespoon chili powder to be on the hot side or not? The amount of hotness I'm aiming for is the hotness of a regular plain curry, not a madras or above. I love this base and I will stick to this for all eternity.

Thank you for the reply. I did of course use level spoons but I used only about 700g of onions in my preparation, which could explain some of the salt overload, but I still think the result would have been a bit too salty for my taste. I do like the technique used in these recipes though and I think I will try experimenting variants in the future. I've always felt most bases had way too few spices in them in the past. Thank you for posting.

Hi, I'm cooking this right now. Are you sure it's 2 tablespoons salt? I'm tasting it and it seems way too salty.