I guess there's "red" and "red".  To my eye, everything from Madras to Phal is red (including Vindaloo as the intermediate strength), but none of these is "red" as in "tandoori red" which is a different shade (carmine ?).  I suppose the end of the Madras -- Phal continuum would be the colour of pure Kashmiri chilli.

Sorry, wrong thread.  Moved.

prawn

I use what ever oil I have available at the time, sometimes this is bhaji oil and sometimes it's plain veg oil. I really don't think it's major factor, you can get good results with both. May I suggest you read the 2008 Bruce Edwards post - it really goes back to the basics of the cooking process but more importantly it says what is happening at each stage. Perhaps you could then compare that with your own method and see if there's anything you can pick up from it?

here's the link https://curry-recipes.co.uk/curry/index.php?topic=2815.0

Quote from: prawnsalad on October 15, 2010, 11:38 PM
I have been mostly using the Kris Dhillon Prawn Curry as a base for vindaloo and varied it with tips from these forums.

That explains the reason why you consider you've wasted your time then. You started by backing the wrong horse!