Topic: Panch Poran

[pete]

I raided my deep freeze last night and served up three curries
Two were mine, one was from a restaurant
The restaurant curry was a vegetable dupiaza
This is desribed as a medium curry cooked with pepper,tomatoes, onion and special spice
One of my curries was a vegetable vindaloo, and was almost identical to the dupiaza, in texture flavour and taste
The only difference was obvious
The vegetables from the restaurant had an aroma of panch poran
Check below, for spice break down
http://cooking4her.blogspot.com/2005/07/panch-poran-five-spice.html
I am moving house, but when I am settled I will experiment with this stuff
It has been mentioned before (Bruce Edwards article for precooking)
but maybe it's a whole lot more important than I realised
It's definitely a missing flavour, if I am trying to match my local takeaway
Has anyone else cooked with it?

[George]

It's definitely a missing flavour, if I am trying to match my local takeaway
Has anyone else cooked with it?

I tried Pat Chapman's spice mix for Panch Poran some time back, which seems similar to most other 'recipes' or mixes for that 'blend'. It has a pleasant aroma, and I recall it's often used in authentic vegetable and fish dishes. I see it as just one of thousands of flavours you can concoct using different mixes of spices and whether some/all of the base spices are pre-roasted or whatever. So there are thousands of 'missing flavours', surely. It's like music. We know all the notes but there are many tunes yet to be discovered. It's endless. But our search is more focussed, isn't it? i.e. to replicate BIR dishes. I thought that the panch Poran spice mix might have potential for some vegetable dishes but I didn't get as far as producing any single vegetable dish which I thought was just like the BIR equivalent.

Regards
George