Topic: I bought the curry base from a restaurant

[napole0n]

I can no longer post under my real name so I have had to join again!!
This is really Pete talking

I bought The Base Curry Sauce from a Restaurant



I went back to one of the places that gave me a cooking demonstration, and I bought the sauce.
On it?s own it is really nice
If you used it to make a curry, then you couldn?t fail to make a brilliant curry.
This sauce is thick.
It has a taste of mildly spiced tomatoes
I know it's mainly onion but the tomato seems to dominate
If you make a shape in it, it doesn?t fill in.
It has the same consistency as any sauce with a curry.
You could happily eat it on its own.
It is red brown
Salty
Smells of caramelised garlic ginger
There are some very finely chopped white bits in which I thought might? be tomato seeds, then I thought they might be garlic, now I really don?t know.
They don?t seem to have much of a flavour but are slightly crisp.
There is definitely an amount of garlic in it (my mouth knows it had a curry)
I think the closest I have made to this, is Muttleys Non Rambling Base.
In fact I am currently thawing out some of his base to do a direct comparison.
I will post the result

[Graeme]

Fantastic stuff.... :

[napole0n]

I have compared the two sauces now.
Muttleys is more runny and lacks a certain body to it
The place I got the sauce from said they put in chick peas and carrots, so that's probably it.
I think the finely chopped bits in the sauce are garlic.
There are definitely two differnet types of base.
The runny one and the thick one.
With the addition of a carrot, 1/2 a can of chick peas in the main boil.
And a couple of cloves of finely chopped garlic in the last half hour of cooking, I think that will do it.
I'm going to try it again, while I still have some of the curry house base sauce to compare.
My mouth feels disgusting.
This curry tasting has a price
The next time anyone buys a curry, why not ask for some of the base sauce.
It won't cost much, and we could do some real comparisons.

[Curry King]

Ive bought vindaloo sauce on its own before and it was exactly the same as it would have been without the chicken.  I got the impression they cooked it at the same time as my chicken vindaloo and just added extra sauce?

[napole0n]

I spent most of the day cooking and ended up with two base sauces
They take so long to do
The first sauce was Muttleys with the slight changes I mentioned above.
The second? was a very similar sauce but I had fried some finely chopped garlic until brown then mixed it in
I placed these along the curry base I bought last night and got one of my kids to do a blind taste on them.
He preferred Muttleys.
He acknowledged the takeaway base having a flavour that he couldn't identify.
But we've all said that, haven't we?

[ghanna]

Hello napelON
i wonder if they are using  channa dal  (bengal gram) and not chickpea ,because most of the indian resturant chefs translate chana dal as chickpea
i asked a freind of mine and he told me they use two sauces to prepare dhanask curry in the resturant .
one of the sauces is the basic curry gravy ,the other one is tarka dal.  The tarka dal is made from chana dal ,browned garlic, ginger and other spices.
He mentioned that sometimes they through some chana dal as well in the curry gravy with the onion , garlic ,ginger and other vegetables and only curry powder(no any other spices)
He said this gravy is very similar to some thing called    RASAM    which ie eaten a lot in south india.
thank you

[pete]

Hey!! I've got my old user name back!!
Thanks S!!
I did a little tinkering with the suace.
I added ground almonds and some dessicated coconut and cooked it a little longer
It now looked the same as the sample sauce.
I reckoned that there was still a slight difference but it was very close
The next stage was to take this sauce back to two takeaway chefs I know
The first one said it just needed a bit more salt
The second one said it needed a little salt and was a bit too thick.
End of experiment

[Graeme]

This is very complicated....is it worth
all the bother? this is now science for sure.

My local served up a dish last night
that was red and over the top with tom.

Me and Ann were both thinking, if they
can't they use red colour at the mo,
so in go the tom's.

very poor vindaloo, very poor!
not going back for a couply of weeks.

Graeme, ( I can not make a curry i give up fame) ha you remember!!

[pete]

End of experiment

Sorry, did I say end of experiment?
I froze the above mentioned sauce last week and used it for cooking on Saturday.
I had a few frozen proper restaurant curries too.
I find that some restaurant curries freeze really well, so why can't you buy them like that?
I made a madras as shown and compared it directly to the one I watched cooked.
It looks identical but there is a subtle aftertaste that is missing.
I think it might be Ghee.
There is no ghee in Muttleys base.
Back to the drawing board.
I will get it exact.
I have attached a pic of my vegetable madras

[pete]

Here's Muttley's adjusted curry base.
I added the Bruce Edward's tarka with it too.