Thanks Bob. Same to you.

Proportions aside, reckon I know exactly how they have been put together, including the “signature” ingredient(s).

More details, please! Even if it's just speculation I like to hear about how different places put their dishes together.

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?