Topic: Hello everyone!

[Lee989]

Thought I'd say hi (and to ask a question afterwards). I'm fairly new to Indian curries, I think I've eaten at 4 or 5 restaurants in total, and only in the past few years. Decided to use cooking as a way to escape the day job (which ends up being the evening and night job if I dont force myself into doing something else), been mainly doing Fairly basic herby pastas and general english stuff so figured I would spread my wings.

My only adventure into Indian cooking was a curry recipe I got from a local pub owner, that also did the pub grub. Until today, I couldn't work out why mine never looked like his, I'm assuming after reading stuff on hear, it was that I didn't prepare the base correctly (in fact, I just whacked everything in, in the order he wrote down and cooked it and served). Main reason I think was my error of not boiling the base correctly and really just heating up the mixture until it was hot enough to eat.

Well now I'm here and looking forward to trying some new things with more detailed recipes that hopefully I can't mess up so badly. I was looking at trying a balti to begin with as its what I tend to always eat along with Bhuna, so I have some sort of reference in my mind as to what it should roughly taste like. but I'm guessing after looking at the forum, what I really want is a madras/balti madras, god knows what the Indian restaurants put in a plain balti, but its hard to find reference to such recipes online.

Anyway, I'll stop going on now, and get to the question I mentioned at the beginning.

Could anyone recommend a good balti madras recipe including what base. I've looked at quite a few recipes but I'm getting a bit of information overflow now. I may be being too picky, but I'm looking for something that resembles closely what I'm used to, to begin with. I'm from Birmingham (black country to be specific) and I've never seen a piece of celery, a carrot or a potato in any of the Balti's I've ordered.

If I am being too picky, then feel free to just recommend a place to start I guess. The curries I've had also tend to be a darker colour rather than the lighter golden colours of some of the recipe pictures I've seen here (not that I'm adverse to the golden colour recipes, I was just hoping to start off in my comfort, "what I know" zone then I have a base understanding to then try new things and other recipes).

Right, I'm going to shut up now. Any help would be appreciated. As I'm sure you can see, I'm all confumbled!

[Stephen Lindsay]

Welcome Lee, you've come to the right place. As I'm from Scotland and not the Midlands I'll start by saying that Balti has never really caught on here in the way it did say in Birmingham in the 80s. Some restaurants here say they offer "Balti" but I've never been convinced this is anything other than jumping on the bandwagon for commercial reasons.

So I'll leave it to others, who will have the necessary savvy to advise you. In terms of colour, partly this could be to do with photography which may reproduce colour only to a degree. However if you want darker curry, then this is achieved by cooking base down. The longer the cook, the darker it gets due to greater caramelisation of the onions, garlic and ginger in the base.

Hope you find some helpful advice and information here, I like many others have benefited from the pool of knowledge on this forum.

[Lee989]

Thanks Stephen. That's really useful to know, so in theory if I find a good rated recipe that seems to contain the kind of ingredients that I would expect based on what im used to eating (I.e. no celery or potatoes), I can vary the colour of the base depending on cooking times (I'd guess that would have an effect on the taste of course, so I'd probably half out the base at the recipes stated times just so I have a comparison, at least Ill learn for myself how cooking times affect flavour).

I figured balti was a little too generic to get a recipe for after hours of reading on here, so I settled for madras as I've tried that before. I'm going to presume balti is just a chefs own interpretation of a generic balti curry dish rather than being a specific thing. Unfortunately my limited exposure to Indian curries thus far isn't helpful in working out the differences between a lot of curries I've ordered.

What makes it worse is the bhuna curries I've ordered tend to have a lot more sauce than most would expect since its supposed to be dry. Not as much sauce as other types, but considerably more than I expect the majority of users here would expect if they ordered a bhuna from the same takeaways.

Anyway, thanks for the reply. The colour thing was one of the more concerning things on my mind for my first attempt. So a basic understanding of how the colour comes about and why some are darker than others is fantastic!

Ill see if anyone else replies with some good suggestions to try. If not ill play roulette and just dive in and hope.

Whilst I'm waiting for the shops to open tomorrow, ill go work out what I'm going to use my curry leaves on that I bought for no apparent reason other than they had "curry" in the title

[Stephen Lindsay]

Good good Lee - if you are looking for a Madras recipe then a popular one on here is by Chewy (Chewy Tikka) - he also has done lots of videos so you can see him cooking in action which is pretty helpful.

The link is here

http://www.curry-recipes.co.uk/curry/index.php/topic,7563.0.html

[loveitspicy]

Hi Hello and welcome

many many many recipes and good cooks on this site

best, Rich

[Yousef]

Welcome to the forum, excellent first post.

Stew

[curryhell]

Good good Lee - if you are looking for a Madras recipe then a popular one on here is by Chewy (Chewy Tikka) - he also has done lots of videos so you can see him cooking in action which is pretty helpful.

The link is here

http://www.curry-recipes.co.uk/curry/index.php/topic,7563.0.html

Wise words and a very good place to start the journey.  We're still working on the balti aspect (Bengali Bob and Jerry M, between the two of them they're sure to crack it or get very close).  If you like Bhuna try 976bars recipe posted in the bhuna section of the main dish section of the forum.  Welcom to the forum