Topic: Who cooks their onions in oil for the base?

[JerryM]

Where did that line of thought come from. It is exactly what they do

the line of thought is just as Bobby said. i phone my TA order and go and pick it up. there is less than 20 mins to cook it and bag it along with doing other orders

i'm ok on the 3 mins - probably faster on the big burners.

[Bobby Bhuna]

i'm ok on the 3 mins - probably faster on the big burners.

If you cook them faster, they will not become sweet. That's why they are cooked slowly - to make them sweet. On a big or small burner, cooking them quickly won't bring home the sweetness

[JerryM]

thanks bobby. i'm ok now on my onions.

hope Stew's jalfrezi hits the spot with u tonight - it did for us - a definite wow!

[SnS]

Where did that line of thought come from. It is exactly what they do

the line of thought is just as Bobby said. i phone my TA order and go and pick it up. there is less than 20 mins to cook it and bag it along with doing other orders

i'm ok on the 3 mins - probably faster on the big burners.

Mmmm ... 3 minutes is okay (BIR) but 5 is not (non BIR) - how strange is that Jerry? 

[JerryM]

it's down to maths.

as i said i order my takeaway and 20 mins later pick it up. there are 3 mains, 1 sauce and 1 chef.

i can't get hung up on it though and i'll make it 5 then (for home cooking).

[chinois]

They precooked onions in the restaurant i was shown. They were the large chunks used for jalfrezi, balti etc. He said they did it so it saved time for those dishes (along with a little green pepper too). He said he added tamarind powder which was surprising. I suppose the sourness brings out the sweetness, in the same way salt was mentioned earlier.
I dont think it's a big deal either way, some of the onions in the dish should be sweet and you can get there however you want

[Derek Dansak]

I always use plenty of veg oil in my base, and for cooking onions. It might be unhealthty but it sure gets that greasy effect like a real BIR curry. I suspect you could achieve a similar taste with less oil but at the moment I am sticking with buckets of oil! Until i make a real replica of a BIR curry that is. I find the long slow cook of the base with lots of oil gets a great result. and improves the next day, which is a bonus. I think lots of garlic in base is good too. The 15 garlic base on this site is one of my favs. 

[Bobby Bhuna]

I love garlic too. You have to keep the base bland though remember!

I've given quite a bit of thought into the slow cooking of onions. I don't think they pre cook them in bulk. I just can't imagine a chef putting a spoonful of sweaty pre cooked onions into the pan - I don't imagine they'd sit well. Plus, we would have heard about it before now.

I think that firstly, not all mains need onions, and those that do don't all need them finely chopped and sweet. There are loads of Madras recipes I have tried and enjoyed that do not contain onions (other than those in the base obviously). So say for example a "curry", Madras, Vindaloo and Phall don't need onions - that's a fair whack of the meals already.

I'm sure they'd have time to give the onions 3-5 minutes in the rest of the dishes. Also bear in mind that if two people order a dish needing the onions done this way they'd probably just bang on two portions of the onions in one go - and so on.

This is definitely one question that you'd get away with asking when you're getting a curry.

[JerryM]

There are loads of Madras recipes I have tried and enjoyed that do not contain onions

i'd 2nd that - i used to put onions in but when i started using gary's method (uses finely chopped garlic) of frying  (woodpecker21) i dropped them and never looked back

I love garlic too

i'd 3rd that.

thanks for the prompt Derek - had not spotted this 15 garlic base - sounds spot on for me buying my garlic by the kilo.  ;D

[lightboy]

after trying both methods i settled on frying the veg in my base
 before adding water