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I'm not sure whether caramelizing onion for the base is really a BIR thing, but I did notice in a few "homestyle" videos that this is one of the things they did. In particular, these two videos -

Madhur Jaffrey's Curry Nation (around 4:30, password: madhur)
http://www.curry-recipes.co.uk/curry/index.php/topic,11933.0.html

The only problem is that caramelizing onions involves a lot of time and attention (this is very evident in the first video). After looking into it though, I found out that a pressure cooker is quite useful for speeding up the process of caramelization (aka the Maillard reaction). See here for a recipe for caramelized carrot soup using a pressure cooker. The results there looked very nice. So, I went ahead and tried it with 4 onions and carrot:



Very important: I added ~1/2 teaspoon of baking soda to this. It's worth noting that the addition of baking soda (in the UK I believe this is just called bicarbonate of soda) alkalizes the water in which the onions cook, which speeds up the caramelization process drastically. Combine this with the extra heat of pressure cooking, and it should be even faster. I also added around a tablespoon of oil to this mixture.

After only 10 minutes of cooking, I ran the pressure cooker under cold water and opened it up. I wasn't expecting it to have turned a deep brown, but it did! The picture quality is poor, but it was a very deep brownish red and the aroma was absolutely amazing:





Since I added too much water in the beginning, it ended up being quite soupy. So I reduced it down for 5 minutes and got this:



I would describe the taste as having a very deep sweetness. It was hard to not keep "taste testing" it, because it tasted like candy. I will be trying this the next time I make curry. The resulting curry from this pictured batch would have been good, but I accidentally drowned it out with way too much tomato puree and lentils (I'm still a newb with curry). I should have used more like 8 onions instead of 4. Has anyone else used caramelized onion for their base? Does this offer any sort of advantage?