Topic: New Member!

[Rickstamatic]

Hi!

I've been lurking for a bit so thought I'd sign up and say hi!

A bit about me. I love curry but can't handle spice so I tend to stay medium. Dhansak and Dopiaza are my go to curries for your typical BIR but in London I find the best restaurants are Punjabi so it's usually a Karahi.

I'm not much of a cook but have always enjoyed making a curry. I have made traditional curries following various recipe books with varied results but never anything like a BIR. I discovered KD's curry secret a few years back and have followed it a few times now. What I make normally resembles a BIR but tends to be a bit lacking in flavour. I stumbled upon this site whilst looking for some inspiration on how to do things better and wow, plenty of resource here to get in to.

Some of what I have done recently and my findings;

KD base with KD dopiaza - I overcooked/reduced the curry so decided to say it was a bhuna as it was dry. It was unintentionally sweet in a good way so wonder if the overcook of the base combined with sliced onion did this.
KD base with KD curry - Tried hard not to over reduce so had a good sauce quantity but it was bland
KD base with KD curry but using BE method of frying spices out first - Had a bit more flavour to it so guess frying the spices helps

BE base with BE curry - My best curry yet in terms of flavour (the base had a much more pleasant aroma than KD) but I still feel there could be more

I'm going through the site now to figure out my next steps and have some thoughts

Could it be worthwhile to use extra base gravy so you can reduce it nicely then add in more near the end to get it saucy again? Trying to re-create my accidental sweetness though this could be due to the actual sliced onion cooking rather than the over reduction of base so not sure.
Frying the spices seems good but I have no idea on how to tell when they are done. I watched them foam and fizzle but felt like I waited too long for them to die down (they didn't really seem to die down at all so I gave up and moved on)
What makes more difference, the frying of spices or the quality of spices? My spices are all supermarket bought but I did go through all the various curry powders and try to find one that looked like a decent one, still from a supermarket though.
Is my lack of flavour just down to using a basic curry recipe? I'm looking for a good curry recipe to go with my BE base for my next curry, any of dopiaza/bhuna/rogon so appear spoilt for choice here but also unsure how to choose what works best with the BE base.

[Peripatetic Phil]

Welcome aboard, Rick.  No time to answer your question at the moment (I have to go out) but I think that if you search the forum carefully you will find most, if not all, of Bruce Edwards' recipes here, perhaps in Word or PDF format, and from those you should find the perfect match to your BE base.

** Phil.