Topic: Spicier Curry Color

[indianbeg]

I'm looking to copy a masala recipe from a favorite restaurant of mine. However, I've noticed the spicier the dish gets it actually changes colors from a light yellow to fiery red. Does anyone have a clue as to what they might be using to make it spicier? I've attached pictures.

[london]

Chilli powder.

[livo]

Perhaps you could name the Restaurant and the dish you are asking about. Maybe you could explain how it is the same dish with different colouration due only to heat variation.  Perhaps you could explain the naming of your photographs. 

[Peripatetic Phil]

I'm looking to copy a masala recipe from a favorite restaurant of mine. However, I've noticed the spicier the dish gets it actually changes colors from a light yellow to fiery red. Does anyone have a clue as to what they might be using to make it spicier? I've attached pictures.

Almost certainly ground chillies.  As a 16-year-old beginner at curry cooking, I believed that the only spice used was curry powder, and I would regularly search Brick Lane and its environs for the hottest curry powder I could find.  Eventually a kind shop owner explained to me that although there are minor variations in the strength of curry powder, it is actually ground chillies that give a curry real heat, and of course being red, the more chilli that is used, the redder the dish becomes.  But food colouring also plays a part, since tandoori chocken is not very hot yet (at least as served in the UK) it is almost invariably a very saturated red.

** Phil.

[mickyp]

Thanks for the Laugh Phil, my experience of curry then was curry powder into a pot with beef, pinapple chunks and sultanas, dumped onto a pile of rice, thanks mum.

[Garp]

Micky, that reminds me of my first curries from the canteen at work. Awful. That and chip-shop curry sauce put me off for ages.

[mickyp]

Garp its a good reference point to look back to and see how far along the BIR path one has travelled.

[livo]

My first curries were the Australian 1960's housewife version of either curried sausages or occasionally lamb, but the curry sauce was the same.   Garp, it was and still is surprisingly similar to chip shop curry sauce and I still love the curried sausages made that way.  It isn't Indian by any stretch of the imagination but for me it is real comfort food.  Onions, apple and sultanas but I've never seen pineapple used.  I usually omit the sultanas as my wife isn't keen on them in the dish.   Curried egg sandwiches was basically the only other use of curry powder in our home.

As for spiciness / heat / colour, my wife informs that when she was an exchange student to Sri Lanka her host family would prepare very mild curries for her assuming Western tolerance to heat. Her host father had his own special curries and they were invariably dark brown to black.  The darker they were the hotter / spicier they were.  Red curries weren't a thing.

[mickyp]

1960

[Garp]

Always liked the idea of a sausage curry, but BIR style - not that horrible yellow sauce with fruit in it (puke).

Will add it to my bucket list.