Topic: From raw ingredients to BIR chicken madras in two hours.

[Peripatetic Phil]

After several years of faithfully following Kris Dhillon's method for preparing the base sauce and final curries (albeit doubling both the quantity of sauce per unit of meat and also doubling the quantity of spices in the sauce), I finally felt I understood the basic ideas well enough to try an alternative approach.  The main disadvantage of KD's methods, to my mind, is the long time needed to prepare the sauce, and it was this that I set out to address.  I decided to make just enough curry for a meal for one, so used one onion, one clove of garlic and one index-finger top-joint of ginger.  All were chopped finely, then gently saut?ed in ghee until very soft.  I then added sufficient boiling water to yield my target volume of curry sauce, and simmered gently for about half an hour.  I then transferred the sauce into a pyrex jug and immediately liquidised it using a Bosch hand blender.  It was clear that the sauce would be of the right consistency.  I reserved about a tablespoon of the stage-1 sauce for the first-stage cooking of the chicken, then transferred the remainder of the sauce back to the saucepan, added a little turmeric and paprika (about half a teaspoon of each), added sufficient groundnut oil to ensure that the spices would cook at the right temperature, and then brought the sauce back to a gentle simmer.  I added sufficient tomato pur?e (but no liquidised peeled plum tomatoes) to achieve the right colour and flavour, then gently cooked the stage-2 sauce for a further 20 minutes.  While the sauce was gently simmering I prepared the chicken as per KD, and basically followed KD's method for preparing the final chicken madras but with double the volume of sauce and double the quantity of spices per unit of sauce.  All was ready within two hours of starting, and was (as far as I was concerned) virtually identical to the flavour that had previously taken 24 hours to achieve (it was certainly not inferior to the 24-hour version in any way). 

So, if you want to achieve a KD-style curry in considerably less time than her method would normally take, you might like to try the method above.  Let me know if you do, and how it turns out.

[chinois]

Well it sounds like you have a good idea of how the ingredients work together Chaa!
It sounds to me like that should work well.
I havent tried an of her recipes so i cant comment further. The important point is only whether you replicated you favourite restaurant. If you did - nice one!