Topic: Sag Aloo again

[rhodriharris]

[rhodriharris]

So i made sag aloo again but this time real oily, not like my local resturant!  All ingredients are added by eye and not by measurement but i fried sliced onions, chopped green peppers and mustard seeds for few mins before adding chilli powder and let this cook for few mins more.  Next i added mick/tazs base gravy, tomato puree, cumin powder, corriander powder and garam massala (all from the rajah range).  I let this cook with couple of handfuls of spinach before finally adding cooked potatos which had been boiled with a pinch of tumeric.  Finally garnish with dried corriander.  One thing to note is that i added a lot of tomato puree to give it more of a red colour.  My kormas are yellow, my chicken tikka masalla is golden brown so hoping to make a red coloured josh or madras next to give me a full range of colours hence experimenting with this sag aloo.  It had a hint of tomato which gave it a richer flavour but overall tasted as good as what i've had in resturants.

[Ramirez]

That looks absolutely delicious! Nice pictures.

[rhodriharris]

Just bombay aloo without the sag for comparison, hopefully i'm getting better at this side dish.

[Malc.]

Do you feel that you are progressing and what recipes have spurred you on? Bombay Aloo is not a dish I have ever tried in a BIR, but I am intending on doing the Bombay Aloo group test, either this weekend or the next.

Incidentally, thumbing through another old curry book I bought many moons ago, I found another alternative recipe for the Green Beans. I'll have to copy it out for you. Looks almost the same but method is different.

[rhodriharris]

Yes i am progressing and so much quicker thanks to this site and its wealth of information.  I make bombay and sag aloo quite a lot since we always have a lot of potatos and love our spinach, it is the easiest curry i make, i say curry as it is really just a side dish but we treat it more like a main dish having this with just rice for dinner quite reguarly.  Hopefully you see why i loved the green bean recipie since it has been hard to find intresting veg ideas to accompany a dish like this.
Anyway my progression these days seems to be just fine tuning what i do, for example just getting the colour and texture right is my main task, easy to make this bombay sag aloo a boring brown colour with the garam massala, tumeric, corriander powder and cumin powder but getting that deep brown orangey brown georgeous mouthwatering colour with lovely oily sheen and just the right texture has been a lot of work and really got to know the spices to get the colour (will never use dye ever) just right and getting the prep and cooking right as well.  I really set out to make what i thought were the classics - bombay/sag aloo, onion bahjee, popadoms, naan, chutneys/raitas, a korma, CTM, rogan josh and madrass.  With this basic recipie knowledge ingrained i would start with the rest. Have conqured (i think) korma, ctm and onion bahjee, hoping my bombay/sag aloo is almost there and tinkering with my rogan josh at the moment so not far to go.
My spice mix seems to be centred around garam massala, corriander/cumin powder, tumeric and chilli powder with paprika being used a lot as well.  This just wasn't cutting it with every curry hence why i have picked up some other popular maybe contraversial spices tamarind included.  Please message me when the bombay aloo group test is on so i can be a part of it, my life is so about bombay aloo at the moment and i make the same dish a lot, time after time neglecting any other dish just hoping to finally get it right.  You said in another thread that on the group test you would use a more basic gravy like or similar to mick and taz's and this is pretty much what i do now so should be a great group test and help me out a lot.
I have waffled a lot and post the other green bean recipie for me, maybe in the same thread as your original green bean recipie, if it's better it goes in my recipie book for sure. So sorry for going on i'm just really loving my curry at the moment. Thanks

[Peripatetic Phil]

Rhodri, the Bombay Aloo group test is already underweigh, and Chris is hoping to summarise the results in a week, so you're going to need to get your skates on if you want to take part; I have completed four of the six so far, and all have been winners in their own way, so get stuck in and enjoy yourself !

P.S. As there are so many posts, it may be worth summarising the key points (Chris, please leap in and correct me if I make any errors of fact) --

1) The recipes are in the very first post, either in place or linked
2) Recommended potatoes are Charlotte or Maris Piper (use the same for all dishes)
3) For all recipes apart from Russ's (a.k.a. Solarsplace's), parboil the potatoes for five minutes in just water, then quench in cold water and leave to drain in a colander.

and a personal observation :

If you parboil for only five minutes, you will probably find that you need to extend the cooking times given in the recipes; this seems preferable to me to (a) par-boiling for longer, or (b) throwing them away as inedibly raw !  It also has two others benefits (IMHO, of course) : (1) by cooking them in the spices for longer, they acquire more of the flavour, and (2) by cooking the whole dish for longer, the sauce is reduced to a thicker, more attractive, consistency that coats the potatoes rather than falling off them.

** Phil.

[Malc.]

As Phil mentions the tests are underway.

I had a better look at the green bean recipe this morning and feel that the original one I posted is better but, I will gladly PM the second one to you for you to try if you wish.

Sounds like your having some fun experimenting with flavours. Onion Bhaji drove me crazy when I started down the path to create them at home. Thankfully, I bumped into Chriswg who suggested this site, which then spurred me to ask my local BIT for help. The rest was history, as they say.

I know I won't be able to replicate exactly, the dishes I love in my local, but I do enjoy cooking them none the less. This site and it's members that contribute on it, has really helped me to create some fantastic dishes.