Topic: The Holy Grail "again"

[bryan@232]

   If using the Curry House Cookery sauce recipe, I reccomend reducing the amount of carrot to about 2 medium carrots for the full 4 litre quantity specified. If making less,adjust accordingly.

[woodpecker21]

hi pete
he doesn't include this as such to include with his recipes but if you look at the very last lines in brackets he says "and save some of the sauce, it can be added to your curries". now i have actually pre-cooked chicken his way and added 2tsp of it to my curry and the house was filled with a fragrant smokey aroma which lingered everywhere for hours. by the way pete well done for getting your tandoori. i agree about the timmings given for cooking chicken tikka (8-10) tandoori chicken (15-20?) i'm sure i have read this somewhere before not sure where though.
hope this has helped

cheers gary

[spiceboy]

To get back to the thread topic, I tried the Holy Grail recipe and found it very good. The "secret onion paste" bothered me a bit because it did not smell right and tasted awful on its own, but when blended with the other stuff the "soapiness' completely disappered. It also took absolutely ages to cook down to the raw bread dough consistency AND it went green - but someone told me thats because I cooked it in an aluminium pan and the onion reacts with the aluminium and goes green - tried it in another pan and they were right!

Pretty good I thought - just as well, I've got a freezer compartment full of little plastic bags of the stuff.

[Mark J]

A friend of mine came to me recently and said he had found a base sauce recipe that produced perfect 100% copies of his local.

Obviously I was very interested and when he sent me the link I was disappointed, it was this Natco grail link.

Anyway I never did try this at the time so decided to give it a go this weekend, I copied what my friend did as follows:

Made the base as described (I covered the onions on the initial slow fry and probably sweated them for over 20 minutes)

I than made 400ml of the base 'medium curry' with my chicken cooking in it.


And finally I fried 2 TSP cumin seeds and a fresh chilli in some ghee and added that to the base medium curry. Note - I didnt do the onion dough soap paste thing


The result was stupendous, without doubt the closest I have come to replicating the BIR at home.

My wife normally says my curries are better than the local BIR's and she doesnt get the taste we are all seeking, however with this one she realised what I was after and said it did have that restaurant taste.

[Jeera]

Did you use red onions  ?

I'm a bit confused with the recipe for the final dish (say a madras). Do you need to cook a 'medium chicken curry' first and then make a madras out of it or can you go straigt from base sauce and cooked chiken to the final dish ?

[Yellow Fingers]

Seems like we're going in circles again. If you look at the ingredients and method used in the base it's not a million miles from KD's method. Have you never tried KD's base Mark J?

YF

[curryqueen]

Hi Mark,

Do you think you could post a link to the recipe you used for me, would be grateful.  How close do you think you have got then? CQ

[Jeera]

The original recipe is on the first page so I'm giving this a go now with the red onions in the base and the 'soapy onion' mixture for later (I hope this is worth it as it has taken about 2 hours to get to the 'bread dough' stage).

Definitely reminds me of the KD base but I wonder if the pre-fried tomato stage is key here.  Look at the recent posts by Dragon who owns a restaurant ... he swears by using Tomato Frito (fried tomatoes !!!).

PS I ground up some cinnamon stick - smells 10X better than an old jar of ground stuff I had in the spice cupboard so I'll let you know how this turns out later.

[Yellow Fingers]

Definitely reminds me of the KD base but I wonder if the pre-fried tomato stage is key here. 

KD's uses fried tomato and spices as well and we've had other recipes on the forum that used fried tomatoes in one form or another, so I don't think this will make much difference.

Anyway, being a sucker for punishment I've just made a batch of the base up and guess what, it's almost exactly like the KD base. The only big difference seems to be the sweetness, it's very sweet, which must be down to the ketchup, fried onion and added sugar. I like a bit of sweetness but this one seems too sweet. Not made a curry yet though.

YF

[Jeera]

I  was trying to say that maybe the fried tomatoes is *the* key step. I've tried the KD version loads of times in the past and had mixed results. I've put my best results down to being drunk at time of cooking and ars*holed at time of eating

I'm a bit pissed right now, so things are looking up for this one.