Topic: Frying Whole Spices

[cg13]

Ok

I made a curry just last night
It was awesome

And I cant take the credit for this as I looked at the belting balti recipe before making it and copied the spices used but nothing else

I then set about creating my base source and I did what the recipe said for this first part

It said to fry hole spices 

This is what I used
2 sticks of cinnamon (I would like to try cassia bark though)
10 black peppercorns
5 cloves
6 green cardomons (left this out because I didn?t have any)
4 bayleavs

After frying put this with any base source and it tastes amazing
You get new and interesting flavours

Note personally I don?t like to use potato or carrot in my base source because I feel it makes the base source just taste like a thick soup

I like to keep my base source simple usually only consisting of:

Onion
Tomato (not tined as they taste acidic) 
Fresh ginger and garlic
Spice mix (this is down to personal preference but I must say I really like asofatida an Indian spice. 
Sometimes a small amount of pepper red or yellow


This led me on to thinking it would be good to try out frying some other spices
Such and curry leaves and mustard seeds what about anis

I would really like to here what other people think.
Thanks 



Sorry if this topic has been discussed before

[haldi]

This recipe certainly has a lot of spices
Can you pick out the individual flavours when you eat it?
Or does it just give a general spicy taste?

[JerryM]

cg,

i think u definitely need to switch the cinnamon to casia.

i particularly like star anis and use it all the time even for pre cooking chicken.

i found an earlier post (http://www.curry-recipes.co.uk/curry/index.php/topic,2454.msg21350.html#msg21350) on frying whole very helpful - ie roast each spice individually

on the use of other spice to make garam i think the more the better (i currently use 13).

nb i no longer make my own curry powder having recently succumbed to trying the rajah - it was really top notch and much better than i could make myself (much closer to BIR). i am also going to buy the rajah garam to compare against my own. in short diy roasting is good to get an understanding of the taste of the individual spices but it may not get close enough to BIR.