Hi all.

If I may pick your brains. Anybody tried using using this herb? Black stone flower/ stone flower / dagad phool.

All the best

Gazzer63

Yes, revolting! The dominant flavour of Natco GM.
Its most probably a Marmite herb, you either love it or hate it.
I can't liken it to anything other than its another perfume flavour like coriander, kewra, rose etc..

Gazzer63
Do you actually have some of this black stone flower. Very obscure,

I seem to remember Vah Chef using it in some of his early Tamil videos.
NOT a herb, its a Lichen/Fungi, with no distinct flavour of its own, another name for it is Kalpasi

It may be used by chefs in South Indian BIR, but I doubt the majority of BIR
will have heard of it, or indeed bother with it, because of its rarity and cost!

Dagarful aka Dagar Phool. It's nice, It's "Indian". It's interesting. I like it.  Is it the "missing link"? No. I don't think so.  Will I use it again? Definitely.

I was looking at something completely different this morning in old posts, circa 2011 and decided to do a Google search on The Curry Club.  My late Father-in-Law was a subscriber way back in the late 1980's when I first met my wife. There is little left of it other than Pat Chapman's books (which cop a fair slamming on this site).  I have none and I don't know what happened to the FIL's old stuff when he passed a few years ago.  Anyway, the Google search surprised me with a find of this very small CRO thread of only the OP and 7 replies (1 from George) dating back to 2005. Pat Chapman knows the answer to the secret

The OP, by Blondie, contains an extract from, and a link to, an article in The Guardian from 2002. 
It's curry, but not as we know it 

I decided to read it through just out of interest.

Cinnamon Club chef at the time Vivek Singh discusses the importation of special ingredients for specific dishes and here I surprisingly found this reference to "Rock Moss".

"In common with other top-class Indian restaurants, the Cinnamon Club imports many spices directly. 'A Rajasthani dish with coriander grown in Kenya somehow doesn't taste the same,' Vivek says. 'We might serve a Rajasthani lamb curry with lemon rice from the south of India, but the Rajasthani lamb curry itself must be authentic.'
Red chillies are brought in from Rajasthan; pepper, cinnamon and cardamom from Kerala; mustard from Bengal; rattan jyot from Kashmir; and rock moss from Hyderabad. This last ingredient, which looks exactly as it sounds, doesn't taste of anything, but brings out the favour of biryanis. 'A real biryani requires a high level of skill,' Vivek explains, 'because the marinated meat is covered with rice that is already two-thirds cooked. Then it is sealed and steamed so that the raw meat cooks in the same time as the rice. It needs a large quantity to work.'

Quote from: livo on April 12, 2018, 10:56 PMThe OP, by Blondie, contains an extract from, and a link to, an article in The Guardian from 2002.  It's curry, but not as we know it 

Great find, Livo.  I read the article from cover to cover, and apart from the fact that I thought that Veerasawmy's was owned by Camelia Panjabi, not Namita, the only part of the article that worried me was this bit : 

QuoteMonosodium glutamate enhances taste and thickens sauces.

Is MSG really a thickening agent ?
** Phil.

I read that too and had the same thought. I don't think it is Phil. At least certainly not in the quantities that I've ever used it.  Maybe they used to use it by the cup-full.

I have some Ajinamoto in the spice cupboard that I occasionally use when it is specifically called for in some Asian dishes or seasoning spice mixes, but it is generally a no show for me nowadays.

I knew a guy (now deceased) who would immediately develop a crippling migraine upon eating even the slightest amount of Flavour Enhancer 621.