Compared to your British curry houses, many German Indian restaurants don't stand a chance. There are exceptions, though.

Expect better restaurants in the bigger cities. "Curry houses" in small towns are not really Indian when they serve "curries, pasta, pizza, steak, sauerkraut and crepes".

Your voyage down the Rhine will most likely not let you step out in the Munich area, but if you happen to come across the Munich airport in the city Freising, there is my favorite curry house in Germany: New Indian Palace, http://www.indianpalacefreising.de

It's the one that inspired me to cook my own since I'm no longer in that region ;-)

Good luck and have a nice trip!

Hello all,

really sorry to bring this up again, but I searched all over and think I'm a little bit "lost in translation" here..

When making a base, I always used "normal" tennis-ball sized, brown onions. The ones you'll get in 1-2 Kg nets in the supermarket, no big deal.

But here in Germany, you'll also find a lot of big onions, like the size of an apple or even bigger, and they're called "Vegetable Onions" (= Gem

Ah the good old tamarind. I've become a fan of "TRS Tamarind Concentrate" for use (1 tsp) in my Vindaloos. This was what I was looking for in perfecting my Vindaloo in a long time.

I know most people here don't seem to be friends with a "sour" Vindaloo, but that's how I know it from my fav restaurants here (on the continent that is). Now I use 1 TBSP vinegar + 1 tsp tamarind concentrate (+ 1 tsp green cardamom crushed) and it' s all it needs to get that special bang!

I love http://offliberty.com/ to save any stream locally, have yet to find a site where it doesn't work.

To save audio from sites that mask their URLs, you could always grab the sound directly from the sound card with tools like http://www.audacityteam.org/.

I'm going to jump in here with a thumbs up for induction. I use a regular electric induction hob with coated steel pans, and it works very well.

One needs to understand how these work, a look in the manual might help: There is a difference between heat and temperature. The induction provides heat to build up temperature. Once a desired temperature is reached at a high setting, it will be preserved on a lower setting. On a scale of 1 to 9, when the induction fires at full blast at 9, it will build up a very high temperature, and set back to 6 or 7 when cooking a curry, it will maintain just the right heat to keep the pan bubbling. Reduction and caramelization just work very well this way, the supplied power is more than enough.

Just one thing does not work for me: using woks with a relatively small base, they just don't build up an evenly distributed heat and keep bubbling in the center of the wok pan. I use a standard Silit pan with a very broad base, and heat gets distributed very evenly in the whole pan, making reduction easy and fast.