Topic: goncalo's BIR food diary

[goncalo]

How was your tandoori salmon served, in thin slices or as tikka or a whole fillet?

Thinly sliced hot smoked salmon is not raw, it is cured with hot smoke. It is delicate and can be enjoyed with many pairings. Probably better to Google it than let me ramble on about it though.

It was served in whole-fillet (which is what I have been referring to as "raw", pardon my whacky terminology). I understand what smoked salmon is, but I love the flavour of it after grilled, whereas I wouldn't like the flavour of a whole fillet, which would still impart a lot of sea  flavors

[goncalo]

Random thoughts:

My benchmark of a good BIR/IR is a chicken jalfrezi. It must have a smoky flavor, must not be overly saucy but not too dry either, must have fresh green chillies, fresh peppers, layers of onion and fresh tomato cooked in the sauce and spices and garnished with thinly sliced coriander. It must be hot, but not head-blowing hot. The cooking principle is a stir fry, not a broil.

Off the top of my head and recollections from my past experience in Cambridge, I reckon these were my favourite restaurants when it comes to this dish: Meghna, Pipasha, Golden Spice and Renus. All of them did a great job at producing a jalfrezi as well as fantastic bombay aloo, which I find is the perfect combination for this dish and they are essentially the references I use when I judge my food or any other restaurant's food. It is thus the dish that I aim to perfect and closely "copy" from my favorites. My agenda isn't too lengthy, but these need.to.be.nailed:

* Chicken Jalfrezi
* Bombay Aloo
* Garlic Chilli Chicken
* Chicken Shatkora

rant off.

[Malc.]

Hi GC regards the salmon, I think it was your reference to raw that kept throwing me. Hot smoke cooks the fish but cold smoke does not. Anyway you've cleared that up for me.

Jalfrezi is one dish I really enjoy these days and has to be among my top 3 at least, though I prefer to have this dish with plain rice. For me this forms the perfect relationship as the two seem to bring the best out in each other.

I find most bombay aloo dishes around these parts are quite mild, dare I say almost boring. How does that compare to what you were used to in Cambridge?

I've yet to try garlic chilli chicken, I must work on rectifying that.

[goncalo]

I find most bombay aloo dishes around these parts are quite mild, dare I say almost boring. How does that compare to what you were used to in Cambridge?

In my experience, bombay aloo is medium spiced, slightly less hot than a jalfrezi, full flavored and aromatic (not in the same sense as a pilau though), has pepper, onions and fresh tomato (occasionally a fresh chilli) -- I can't put my finger on what exactly is under that flavour, but whatever it is, has to be one of the spices making up panch phoron. At a guess, it could quite possibly be mustard seeds which I've seen in several non-bir recipes as well.

There is nothing bland about the bombay aloos I have tried in england -- though if you ask about bombay aloo in Ireland then that's another story. It's just an aloo curry.  This may be one of the reasons why I am finding it so hard to nail the right amount of flavor in the spuds. There also isn't a lot of sauce in bombay aloo and I'd say that any sauce is generally made up of mashed bits, hence thick in density. A bit oily would be characteristic in most TAs here as well.

N.B: These are essentially my regional observations, as I've never heard about the origins of this dish and never had the chance to branch out of Cambridge too much, but it's not too late ;-)

[fried]

I'm not really into fish curries or prawn for that matter but surely the smoked salmon is lost in the Ceylon.
I popped into my favourite Gare du Nord Tamil restaurant for lunch and the owner as he sometimes does, give me a little dish of something to taste. Today it was a dried fish curry, I didn't really like it but the taste of the fish came through quite strongly.

Not sure what the connection is, but maybe someone will find it useful ;D

[goncalo]

I'm not really into fish curries or prawn for that matter but surely the smoked salmon is lost in the Ceylon.
I popped into my favourite Gare du Nord Tamil restaurant for lunch and the owner as he sometimes does, give me a little dish of something to taste. Today it was a dried fish curry, I didn't really like it but the taste of the fish came through quite strongly.

Not sure what the connection is, but maybe someone will find it useful ;D

I'm not sure what you mean by 'lost', I have not felt anything missing in my dish. Quite the contrary.. :-)

[goncalo]

I think this weekend, I am going to try a couple of things I haven't done before, which don't require base. One is the aloo keema, which I had yesterday for the first time and loved. I have not found a recipe on this site, but titli's busy kitchen has one, so I'll give that one ago, using my current mix powder (CBM mix powder #2). I am also going to try and make tasty bombay aloo without base. In case I change my mind about which base I get to do next, I accept suggestions:

1. ChewyTikka
2. cook4one C44
3. Zaal
4. KD1
5. ...?

(Tried already: CA, TAZ, C2G, DARTHPHALL, CBM's book)

Also, any other baseless recipes you can recommend are always welcome :-)

[DalPuri]

I'm not really into fish curries or prawn for that matter but surely the smoked salmon is lost in the Ceylon.
I popped into my favourite Gare du Nord Tamil restaurant for lunch and the owner as he sometimes does, give me a little dish of something to taste. Today it was a dried fish curry, I didn't really like it but the taste of the fish came through quite strongly.

Not sure what the connection is, but maybe someone will find it useful ;D

You probably wont like Nethili either then. Curried whitebait. mmmmmmn  ;D

[fried]

I don't even really like prawns in a curry! A nice bowl of fried whitebait on the other hand

1. ChewyTikka

Number one for a reason.

I like the Zaal too although I've just started using my first batch.

[goncalo]

Thanks fried. I need to try that one, however, here's what happened tonight. As I think I wrote before somewhere, I was going to visit the tandoori himalaya today and I did. Starter: tandoori mix platter, popadoms and chutneys/pickles/raita as usual. Mains:

I ordered:
- jalfrezi
- bombay aloo

the missus ordered:
- butter chicken
- pilau rice

1 peshwari, 1 keema naan.

The tandoori mix had no red coloring. That made me suspicious. There was 2 sheek kebab, 2 pieces of fatty beef piece, 1 chicken leg, 1 chicken breast on the bone. Upwards of ok, not amazing.

The mains arrive and the first impression was "I'm up for disappointment" judging by the amount of sauce in the dish, but as the taste counts more in my book, I tried not to let me down by pre-judgement. I look at butter chicken, which was red colored and I wondered whether they had brought in chicken tikka by accident.

I eat the first spoon off of my jalfrezi and the first thing I notice is that the sauce tasted exactly the base sauce I made at home with CBM's recipe and C2G's recipe, which comes quite close. Worst, there was no tomato puree in it, so it was like I was eating just stock with a bit of meat and green peppers. It was extremely mild for my tastes. The bombay potatoes was the same dish but with potatoes. The naans were good, so the last thing on the agenda, was to give butter chicken a try. I remember having tried this before in UK and I didn't become a big fan of it, but then I'm not a big butter fan either. The butter chicken was essentially a tomato soup mixed with a little base sauce and loads of food coloring. Disappointing, but I couldn't judge better.

Rating: 2.5/5

Thankfully I know better already, but I'm seriously wondering if there is room for proper indian in Dublin, because the irish will eat just about anything and think it was the best meal ever, so much so that with my current skills and knowledge I'm quite confident I could profit (though I have a relatively stable career in IT, so probably unlikely.) on at least a couple of dishes that I have rehearsed plenty.

That said, I seem to recall someone's comments that chewytikka's base was very similar to CBM's and that it was a true bangladeshi styled base, which I think is also what I got tonight and which made me feel a little sick -- I know the staff was bengali and presumably the chefs were too. Seeing as I had my share of "pure bengali" bases, I'd be keen on trying other variations/bases, so that probably leaves me with Zaal's base as a potential candidate.