Topic: Base sauce portion advice

[Korma Chameleon]

During my own early BIR attempts, the most confusing aspect for me was getting the correct amount of base sauce for each curry, and at the right consistency. My advice now, to ensure repeatability, would be to think of it as splitting the finished base sauce into a predetermined number of portions. Don't worry about volume at all, just be sure to keep a thin consistency.

The problem with portioning by volume is that it depends on finished sauce thickness, which could vary from one chef to another, and even from one attempt to another. By splitting into a predetermined number of portions, you ensure that you capture the correct amount of ingredients (onions) in each portion. This can be more complicated than need be depending on what the chef states in his method. Some chefs are clear enough to state ''split into # portions''. Others might say for example, ''you should end up with about 2400 ml from which you can take portions of 400 ml''. You yourself might not end up with 2400 ml at all, and personally I find it difficult to measure that amount of hot sauce in any case, but what you would take from this example is that you should split your own finished base into 6 portions. Then there are those chefs who state ''thicken to a soup type consistency and split to portions of ### ml''; the most difficult to follow.

I'd also recommend you check the amount of meat that each chef uses with his own sauce portion, and either use that same amount of meat, or pro-rata the portion size of your base sauce to match the amount of meat you prefer to use.

In respect to sauce thickness, just think... thin is good, thick is bad. It doesn't need to be more complex than that. Obtaining exactly the chefs intended base sauce thickness is just not important. So long as the sauce is pretty thin, then it's easy to thicken up in the final curry. If you start with a thick base however, you might make the same rookie mistake as me and produce an overly thick and spicy curry. In any case, the advised curry cooking method has you flash fry the G&G, spices & onion/pepper, then gradually add base sauce to prevent sticking and burning, while importantly cooking the spices for some minutes. During these minutes, the sauce is thickening considerably and easy to control, so no harm at all in having a very thin sauce to start with. The only advantage of a thick sauce is reduced storage volume, but it should still be well thinned down before using in the final curry.

Hope it helps someone.

[Peripatetic Phil]

Hope it helps someone.

It should help many -- all good sound sensible advice.
** Phil.

[macferret]

Thanks. It's really useful to have stats like that, particularly when planning a meal for a larger party
As a rule of thumb we reckon on 5 portions per litre of thick gravy (which we then dilute to about 1200ml).
By the way, when doing catering jobs we cook the sauce separately to the meat in advance and a litre of sauce does about 10 buffet portions, which would be 100g of protein; a full t/a portion would use 450ml of sauce and 150g of protein.  We pack rice in 650ml foil tubs, each of which contains 350 cooked rice. This corresponds to 170g of dry rice.
Off now to try on a new anorak
Cheers,
Tim

[commis]

Hi
This is a great post and Macferret please post more of your tips, great advice for those who entertain.
Regards

[Sverige]

Thanks. It's really useful to have stats like that, particularly when planning a meal for a larger party
As a rule of thumb we reckon on 5 portions per litre of thick gravy (which we then dilute to about 1200ml).
By the way, when doing catering jobs we cook the sauce separately to the meat in advance and a litre of sauce does about 10 buffet portions, which would be 100g of protein; a full t/a portion would use 450ml of sauce and 150g of protein.  We pack rice in 650ml foil tubs, each of which contains 350 cooked rice. This corresponds to 170g of dry rice.
Off now to try on a new anorak
Cheers,
Tim

Hi mac. Are you saying you dilute your litre of base to 1200ml then divide by 5 and cook a curry with each fifth of that quantity? So 320ml of base per curry?  How do you then get to 450ml of finished sauce (which seems a lot for a portion), or does this 450ml volume include the meat, in which case it's around 300ml of sauce which is still a lot to yield from 320ml of base.

I've probably got my sums wrong or misunderstood you so maybe you can set me straight. And remember not to swear for fear of upsetting the children...

[livo]

Sverige, your math is wrong.   

He's saying 1200ml / 5 = 240 ml per serve, but no mention of quantity of meat added to this amount.

Buffet portions are 100ml of sauce to 100 gm of protein, so the litre of sauce is used for each kg of meat.  Don't know if this is before or after thinning the sauce out to 1200 mls though.

AND he confirms what we all already know about T/A, by them giving you triple the ratio of sauce to meat as given in the buffet portion.  100:100 (1:1) compared to 450:150 (3:1).

[Sverige]

Aw yeah, 240mils. Never was the brightest bulb on the Christmas tree when it came to math.  But from 240ml of base how do you get to 450ml of finished sauce? Unless he was referring to the buffet portion size of 100ml per portion?

[livo]

No mate. He's talking about 3 different portion sizes.

240 ml is a single portion size. That's 1 cup of sauce.  We don't know how much meat / protein he uses in this but he gets 5 of these out of his 1200 ml of sauce.  As a single person serving I would suggest using about 200 g of meat / protein.

The 100 ml and 100 g protein is his buffet sized portion.  Obviously used when catering and the curry is only part of a meal.

Lastly is his 450 ml of sauce with only 150 g of meat, which is what he puts in a T/A meal container.