Possibly my favourite CA dish so far!

[Edwin Catflap]

I made and ate CA's chicken tikka masala phall this weekend and absolutely loved it!!!

2 tsp's of kashmiri mirch and a tbsp of dried birds eye chillis blitzed in the grinder were the order of the day, all washed down with Dips mushroom pilau rice, roti's and Cobra beer! What a lovely mixture of heat and sweetness!!

Here's the piccy!

[Edwin Catflap]

One thing that amazes me is that if cooked right, all these hot dishes don't give you the ring of fire that I used to get in the past! No more "comfy bum" toilet paper from the fridge!

[Salvador Dhali]

One thing that amazes me is that if cooked right, all these hot dishes don't give you the ring of fire that I used to get in the past! No more "comfy bum" toilet paper from the fridge!

I'm sure this topic has been done to death already on this forum, but I make some stupidly hot dishes and the only time I've ever suffered from the dreaded ring of fire is after a hot restaurant/takeaway curry.

My theory is that it is caused by a dish in which the chilli powder is not cooked long enough. It doesn't happen all the time though. I've had the same dishes in the same restaurant and not suffered the RoF, and I suspect that it could be down to how busy they are / how quickly the dish is prepared.

At busy times curries are being thrown together at an incredible rate, so perhaps they're not being cooked for as long as they should on occasions?

Otherwise, it's a mystery!

[Edwin Catflap]

Hi SD

Its definately down to the cooking out of the spices and powders until they are almost sticky in the pan.
A friend of mine who had a go at one of the phall recipes on this site made the mistake of not cooking the thoroughly enough and the resulting dish was too bitter and too fiery at both ends.

Cheers

Ed

[coolflow]

Yep dofo agree , the restaurants always give me a bad belly in the middle of the night and the stingest ring the next day. but mine dont but still have all the heat.

[Stephen Lindsay]

lol the image of all these guys going to the restaurant and ordering the hottest curries then suffering the next day is making me laugh - payback time?

Anyway back to topic Edwin - your CTMP looks superb though not sure I'll ever venture into the incendiary level of BIR - I think that's curryhell's job!

[fishy]

I was told by a bangladeshi chef that when they cook vindaloo and phall they cook the dish longer which makes the dish hotter, they said by cooking chilli powder longer it adds more heat, not experimented with this myself yet

[Edwin Catflap]

Well i haven't had any TA's since finding this site, but decided to have one th other day and i had a madras which is my usual. Unfortunately I got what i sometimes used to get from my local TA's, an overly sensitive burning tip of my tongue which almost stopped me eating it. It wasn't any hotter than my Chewy's madras and definatly not hotter than the phall in this topic. My question is what causes this?? It didn't quite spoil the dish but i didn't enjoy it as much as my own.

Ed

[curryhell]

I was told by a bangladeshi chef that when they cook vindaloo and phall they cook the dish longer which makes the dish hotter, they said by cooking chilli powder longer it adds more heat, not experimented with this myself yet

My kitchen is full of BIR smell  : : So lovely when that happens I've just cooked a phall, a really thick super hot one with dry saag bhaji and pilau rice.  The phall has been on my mind since i read your post earlier today as i've not cooked one for a little while.
Regarding the longer cooking to get the heat, this is probably quite true.  When at Zaal earlier last year being shown how to cook a phall by chef Az he added a cup of water once all the gravy was added which made the curry quite runny again.  The reason for adding the water he explained was to get the heat out of the chilli.  This obviously meant a longer cooking time to get the sauce to the desired consistency again.  However, we only added half chef's spoon of chilli powder  which isn't that much.  As soon as the water went in and the chilli cooked for a little while, i would never have believed that such a small measure could generate so much heat    And i've been eating the stuff for 25 years plus.  It certainly is not the volume of chilli powder, but how you cook it.  Try adding a cup full of water next time and reducing it down and see what it does to the heat 
Let us know how you get on

[fishy]

Thanks for the tip CH, I will experiment.

I have tried phalls from several different resturants around here and they always have a slighty burnt powdery taste to them (not so much in the vindaloo's), I suppose it goes to show that they do burn the hell out of the spice