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Here is the recipe in its entirety.
Base Sauce
Use any good recipe for chicken stock if you need one please ask as I have one for everyday and one for chinese dishes.
Roughly 2.5 pts chicken stock - I didnt measure this but have topped pan to approx level and measured
400g Thinly sliced onions
200g Carrots chopped
20g Garlic Puree bottled from Indian Supermarket
10g Ginger Puree as above
10ml Cumin Ground
10ml Coriander ground
10ml Turmeric powder
10ml Paprika Natco or Rajah if I remember right
1 Large stick celery sliced
250g Butter
1. Turn butter into ghee by gently melting and passing through muslin or tea towelto remove solids.
2. Mic the cumin,coriander,turmeric, and paprike with water to get a nice not too thick paste.
3. Put wok on high heat and add about 180g ghee.
4. Add sliced onions and stir fry until soft about 7 mins
5. Add the chopped carrots and continue to stir fry until you can just see the onions starting to caramellise about 5 mins.
6. Add garlic, ginger and spice mix and stir fry without burning for about 1 min until the smell gets more fragrant.
7. Add celery and stock and bring to the boil.
8. Turn heat down and simmer until celery is softened about 20 mins - you should notice the ghee is now floating on the top.
9. Remove from heat and blitz so there are no lumps remaining.
10. At this stage I split the sauce into 2 pots there was in total 1.25 litres of sauce - I added 80g blitzed chopped tomatoes to one of the pans.
11 Bring both saucepans to boil and simmer until ghee starts to separate add water as necessary to achieve a consistency such that if you dip a spoon in the back it isnt quite coated
12 Remove from heat - you should notice that you get a lot less separation of the ghee.
13. Remove scum from surface if you wish - I didnt as I was a bit rushed
Sauce is complete
Moved from New Base Gravy from visit to Saffron by SnS
What a load of twaddle you guys are talking. I want you to step back from all this rubbish talked for a second and peruse your own navels. Base, gravy, sauce what ever you want to call it is a very simple concoction. It will be different in almost every curry house in the world. But it will taste something like a curry in the final dish. Wherever I have travelled throughout Britain and Europe I have always stopped to sample the local curry house fare and without fail they have tasted like some sort of curry which can be categorised as good, average or different from normal UK or wouldn't try again.
Now lets look at the recipes that have been submitted to this board for curry bases over the years. They consist of vegetable soup, generally ginger/garlic puree, spices in various proportions and oil.
Now if I were an Indian Restaurant owner I would be looking to create what I would call a generic vegetable soup using readily available cheap vegetables. So in the UK what are the cheap vegetables? Onions bought by the sack, potatoes bought by the sack and carrots bought by the sack. Total cost of a sack weighing 25Kgs of each no more than ?15. Thats a lot of soup. 75Kg plus water plus oil/ghee. The other cheap commodity is of course chopped tomatoes in tins.
My wife was recently on a weight watchers diet and one of the staples of the diet was a "eat as much as you like vegetable soup" made strangely using most of the above ingredients. Did it taste good - Yes.
Now I put to you that the difference in "taste" from one curry house to the next and the quality of the final curry depends on this soup mix and the mix of the spices and herbs used to produce the final base sauce plus the quality of oil/ghee used.
So lets look at the soup first.
Quantity of Onions
Quantity of Carrots
Quantity of Potatoes
Tomatoes - if i wanted a slightly different flavour to the soup.
1. To make a weight watchers soup I would throw all the chopped ingredients into a pan and boil until cooked. Puree half the mixture and season to personal taste. To change the flavour I would perhaps add some tomatoes.
2. To make a good soup to restaurant standard I would first soften the onions frying in a little oil or butter (could be Ghee)add the carrots to the oil, fry for a few more minutes then add some vegetable or chicken stock and the potatoes. Puree half and season to taste. You have then got a reasonable quality soup. Especially if you add a few herbs as well.
Most Indian Restaurants would adopt method 1. above to make their soup - chuck everything in puree it add spices etc quick and easy.
Quality restaurants however would probably use method 2 to produce a deeper more refined taste.
Now lets look at how we I believe should produce a curry base sauce.
Take your choice of soup recipe and experiment with it until you have a achieved the best soup you can with no garlic/ginger or added spices other than salt and pepper.
We will call this the base soup - try making it with Ghee rather than vegetable oil - you will find that you get a much richer taste. Now lets make the curry sauce which we will make generic.
Firstly add your oil or ghee to your pan on medium heat - you can add as much or as little as you like at this stage depending on how much oil you want at the end.
Add your onions and soften and then your ginger and garlic being careful not to burn the garlic which will impart a bitter taste to the final base.
Now add your spices with a little water - I have found that equal quantities of ground coriander,ground cumin,sweet paprika - not smoked, and turmeric work well.
Stir fry for around 30 secs or so until the aroma becomes more intense. Add your carrots (if not frying with onions) and potatoes and other vegetables if using. Top up pot to your desired level (based on vegetable soup recipe )with water or even better stock - simmer until mushy.
Puree the lot add back to pan and top up with water or stock to a thin consistency bring to the boil and simmer without a lid until oil starts to separate from curry soup.
Turn off soup and skim off the scum formed on top - there is always more if you use tomatoes.
You are now ready to make your deluxe curry which should be better than the majority of take aways depending on the recipe used from this board.
I would be very surprised if expensive ingredients such as peppers are added to the base sauce mix as the majority of Indian Restaurant owners are worse than the Scots for keeping hold of their hard earned cash.
A couple of other tips for cooking curries which I always use:
Precook your meat depending on the cut
chicken breast - cube and add to pan - just cover in water with no salt added bring to the boil turn off after 3-4 minutes and leave in pan - by the time you have prepared your sauce this will be cooked/ slightly under it will finish cooking in the sauce.
Bone In Chicken as above but allow 10 mins boiling time - do this for Chinese cooking as well
Use the leftover water as stock to adjust the thickness of the curry sauce
Pork Cubes as per chicken breast - pork shouldn't be overcooked
Beef/Lamb - unless a really tender cut - (but I normally use neck or shin for extra flavour) slow cooker for a minimum of 2 hours just covered in water. Cook until meat melts in your mouth.
Topic: Curry Tester's Base Soup + Curry (Read 35158 times)
