Topic: Take out Vindaloo from local restaurant....

[fstr n u]

My wife, son and i have frequented a local Curry restaurant and found their Vindaloo to be very different from what we've come across before.  I spoke with the hostess and she said they make their Vindaloo from very few ingredients: tomato, ginger, garlic, chilli and coconut.  I was shocked to hear there was no cardamom, vinegar, cloves, cinnamon, etc.

In going back on a recent visit i noted the base to be very oily, slightly orange/brown in color.  Notable tomato flavor with onions in the base and a seed of some sort (think cumin seed).  The flavor was tomato-ey, sweet, vinegar-ey and really enjoyable.. The hostess clarified on this recent visit, they don't use tomatoes...they use tomato paste.  This brought me to my first experiment doing a simpler Vindaloo and i want to get your thoughts:

In the first pic, you'll see the diced chicken thigh meat in paprika, garlic/ginger, oil marinade
In the second pic you'll see the base gravy with all spices added except for fenugreek...cooking down
In the third pic, the chicken has been added in addition to the fenugreek.... we served following with garlic naan bread


For a small batch sauce:
1 med onion chopped    5 garlic cloves and chopped ginger (in equal amount to garlic)    1 can tomato paste (small can mixed with twice the amount of water...diluted), and 1 serrano chilli pepper diced

Dry ingredients prepared:
sugar: 1 tsp
salt: 2/3 tsp
sweetened coconut flakes: 2.5 tsp
kashmiri powder: 1.5 tsp - 2.0 tsp
water: 250-400 mls depending on consistency
vegetable oil as needed
1/4 tsp garlic powder
3 cloves ground
1/8 tsp cinnamon powder
1/8 ts cardamom powder
1/4 tsp garam masala powder
1/4 tbsp fenugreek leaves ground (dried)

1. cooked down onion in oil until translucent
2. added ginger/garlic and serrano pepper (continued cooking on low-med heat for 5 minutes
3. added a 2-3 ladles (chef spoons) tomato paste (diluted) and heated
4. added contents to a blender and made into a sauce
5. returned to pan and contined on low heat
6. added all spice (except fenugreek) and water (and bit of oil) as needed while cooking
7. added pre-cooked chicken to gravy and continued cooking for 10-15 minutes   (at this stage, add sweetened coconut, sugar, water, oil, salt, kashmiri as needed to get flavor profile correct for individual taste)
8. added fenugreek powder and cooked for 3-5 minutes prior to serving

**After making this, i can say this is a darn tasty curry.  Is it vindaloo?  Not sure.  What i will do differently next time is double the amount of onion earlier in the saute and add some black pepper (ground) and see how this turns out.  Otherwise, this was a really nice curry and will keep tinkering with this self-taught recipe.  It's 80% close to the restaurant version (without them giving away specific instructions)..  I offered to pay them to learn how to cook their curries and the hostess seemed interested.  We'll go a few more times to this restaurant and hope that familiarity and an "honorarium" down the road will allow me to audit their kitchen and cooking techniques.**

[Sverige]

Hi Ryan, thanks for posting the recipe, it will certainly be interesting if your restaurant will offer you lessons in how they cook in bulk as I don't think we have any eye witness accounts of Canadian Indian restaurant cuisine. Even when a restaurant lets you behind the scenes in their kitchens I've found they often "dumb down" their recipes into something they think a customer could cook at home, so press them to show exactly how they do it, not just what they think you can do in your home kitchen.

The recipes on this forum are almost exclusively in the BIR style, which is quite different from some of the recipes you've kindly been sharing. I know the Australian Indian restaurants cook quite differently to BIR and so it may be you're onto the right track in trying to replicate Canadian Indian restaurants, but I doubt any of us know. It's good to see something a bit different anyway 

[Peripatetic Phil]

it may be you're onto the right track in trying to replicate Canadian Indian restaurants, but I doubt any of us know ...

When I first started visiting Ontario in 1985, even the Chinese food was dire, but it had improved out of all recognition by 1990, mainly due to the exceptionally large number of Chinese students applying to Waterloo and other Ontario universities.  The Indian food in Waterloo was not bad at all, and certainly bore some resemblance to BIR cuisine, and there was an extremely good multi-ethnic food store from which I could buy almost everything apart from pancakes for crispy & aromatic duck (I had to make my own).

** Phil.