Hi JerryM,
To be honest I discovered this by chance. The guy called Curry Barking Mad (Mick) posted something interesting on the "other forum" which caught my attention.
He was lucky enough to get a Pakistani chef from a reputedly good TA into his curry shed for a full-on base, spice mix and curry session. The chef was called Taz.
The base recipe was quite simple - just onions, some green pepper, some tinned toms, fresh garlic, fresh ginger, turmeric powder, whole cumin seeds and whole corriander seeds. Nothing else, so quite a simple base. Taz's technique is to make the base quite oil-heavy and at the cooking stage he doesn't add any extra oil, just the oil in the base is sufficient to cook with.
His spice mix is similar to the BE one but with 8% more turmeric and 8% less corriander but otherwise remarkably similar.
I made the base and spice mix and followed the recipe with some scepticism as I thought the base was too simple. But like others who tried (including CBM himself) I was very pleasantly surprised by the results.
Anyway, I wondered if it would work with a more complex base and I still had quite a lot of SnS 2008 base in the freezer.
I knew I would need more oil as the Taz base has 100% more oil than the SnS one but by using the 3 tablespoons of oil I cooked the onions in I reckon it balanced out the oil to match the Taz method.
The results of cooking 2 curries using the SnS 2008 base but with the Taz mix-it-all-up and reduce technique have produced my best curries to date.
I'm not saying this is the way to go for everybody and every curry as I think Taz has a unique approach but it does work and works well.
Another thing I have learned: In the past I was wary of too much turmeric and of cumin dominating the taste. The Taz base did taste quite strong with cumin and both his base and spice mix contain a fair proportion of turmeric, more than I would normally expect to use but the taste was spot on.
I still need to decide which produces the best results for me i.e. the Taz approach with SnS base or with the Taz base - they are both good, very good in fact.
This Taz thing is a bit of a distraction as I was going to try the CA base and spice mix but I will try that one next as I'm running out of base now.