Here is a detailed review of the LA Diner meat:

https://shawarmapolice.com/2017/08/04/farmfoods-l-a-diner-doner-meat/

Oh no, Bob - did you read that review? It gives it a score of 0/10 and says:

It has the texture of a graveyard
Tastes like existential dread
When you open the packet, it smells like someone has farted on it
There are absolutely no redeeming features about this product. None whatsoever.

 

A few other thoughts: I had a "real" (takeaway) bhuna tonight for the first time in a while and I was pretty shocked at the difference between it and my recent home-made curries.

The takeaway bhuna was thinner and wetter than I make my own. Not too much floating oil, but the container was stained plenty well which probably means there was lots of oil mixed in with the base.

The taste was the real interesting part. Compared to my own version it was much less rich in flavour. Instead there was a pronounced kind of sourness and a kind of sharp, tangy feeling to it. Not quite like lemon juice, but almost. My own curries definitely don't have this sourness. I'm thinking the key difference was maybe tomatoes. I tend to use tomatoes straight from the tin. Maybe I should be blending them with plenty of water and perhaps try adding methi and garlic like I've seen Latif's Inspired (YouTube) do.

The smell of the curry was also less rich than my own - dare I say mine might even smell better than this one did - however there's definitely still something missing from my own which I still can't identify. You know when you get poppadoms and the bag is all oily? There's a smell to the bag (or that oil) which I think I can also detect in the curry. Maybe they're using reclaimed fryer oil which they've previously used to fry the poppadoms. We all know that onion bhaji and pakora oil is used in a lot of curries but this smelled different. I would love to know what takeaways do with the "regular" fryer oil (chips etc.) - I can't believe they all just chuck it out.

Recently I've been getting a bit bored of my own curries - not because they're bad, but because they all taste quite similar.

Obviously I don't mean my korma tastes the same as my madras, however I do find that my curries tend to fall within two or three groups, flavour-wise:

* Creamy (korma, some chasni, CTM, makhani etc)
* Tomatoey/rich (rogan josh, madras, bhuna, dopiaza, jalfrezi, jaipuri, karahi, balti)
* Sharp/tangy (achari, some chasni)

Even when I try to vary the flavours by adding more of a certain element (e.g. peppers) the underlying curry itself still tastes pretty similar.

To my palate, a bhuna can taste almost identical to a karahi, which can be only slightly different from a jaipuri/jalfrezi, which can be almost identical to a balti, and a madras is like a hotter rogan josh.

Does anyone have any techniques they use to really make each curry stand out?

How do the restaurants do it?

Hi all if any recipes needed please give me a shout and will have a look, have all the Taz recipes, which are excellent and also the Cook4One recipes too which i have tried nearly all of them.
I do still sell curries around 40-120 a week, better than the restaurant, that's what my customers say lol.
CTM is my best seller by far making 20-30 every week.

That's amazing UF. Is it just you doing everything yourself from home, like a cottage industry? I dream about being able to do that, if only so I have an excuse to buy ingredients in bulk.

If you have all the Taz recipes saved offline, could I PM you with my email address for a copy of them all, please? I can then post them (with credit to you) in their respective threads.

The forum is broken.

Yes I noticed this myself several years ago. I sent a PM to the admin (Yousef) about it but never heard back.

You could try finding a historical copy of any broken pages using the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine but it's unlikely that many pages have been archived.