Topic: base sauce

[stevejet66]

curry is an indian cassarole once cooked thats it, the base should taste as a curry should be with a few bits before its taken away or eaton, if we cook a stew or cassarole we dont exactley add it to another pan to spice it up and make it better do we apart from warming it up to eat. all be it with a take away they do add a bit of onion/green pepper, just think most restaurant vids are made for publicity, as for the ones ive watched and made are no where near the wolverhampton/birmingham B.I.R

[DalPuri]

Base sauce/gravy is just a spiced vegetable stock which ALL good restaurants (whatever the cuisine) will use to make sauces, casseroles or stews.
The only difference being the curry spices used.

 Meat stocks made with bones are also used for the same purpose.

[natterjak]

Hi chaps, please bear in mind this section of the forum is specifically for posting recipes for curry base sauce, not for discussion threads about base sauce. There is a forum section for discussions about base sauce recipes, it is here: http://www.curry-recipes.co.uk/curry/index.php?board=82.0

Keeping threads separated like this helps us all find stuff more easily in the future. Thanks very much.

[Stephen Lindsay]

sj66 - and your point is?

[beachbum]

I think SJ66's point is that curries should be more like casseroles as opposed to being "assembled" from a bland base which is then spiced up in a separate pan.

For those who are looking for the elusive 70s taste rather than to replicate the current BIR offerings this is an interesting concept. On another forum they refer to an "interview" with an elderly retired Bangladeshi chef who worked in restaurants at the time who said that when BIR restaurants started to become popular the common features in most "Indian Restaurant" kitchens was:

No base sauce
No dry mix
Mutton and Chicken were the only meat, initially.
Pots of full flavoured "meat curry" and pots of "veg curry" that would be simmering and I would suppose could be turned into a meat Dopiaza or chicken Dopiaza or a meat Vindaloo or a Chicken Vindaloo just by the addition of meat or chicken etc etc.

The way the menus were set out suggests this could be the case. In Australian Indian Restaurants - many of them founded by UK re-migrants (it that's a word) who had cooked in the UK, they still have a family of different dedicated gravies such as nut gravy, vindaloo gravy, butter gravy etc but nothing that equates to the BIR common base. This could be a historical "pointer" to the traditions they brought with them from their UK kitchens thirty years ago at a time when there were few existing Indian restaurants in Australia.

Now that I've got a few litres of Glasgow base to play with I'm actually planning to do some side by sides with for example a Beef Vindaloo cooked BIR style in the ally pan, and a version slow cooked like a casserole to see which one seems closer to the old-school taste . Last one I did in the slow cooker actually turned out more 70s from my recollections of those days.