I was talking with Latif at my takeaway yesterday. I asked him what he thought were the major changes in BIR cooking techniques since the 70's. He identified two main points.

1) The chicken and lamb used in BIR's in the 70's were generally low grade meat. The meat was tenderised first by prolonged boiling (with other ingredients?). Floating, congealed, saturated fat was removed from the stock. The remainder was then used instead of water in the base gravy - albeit very unhealthy, this added a particular flavour.

2) The base was made with copious amounts of veg oil which was then recovered as 'spiced oil' which was then used neat (or diluted with some fresh) to cook the curries. Apparently, some but not many, BIR's still use this oil recovery method. He does not.

These methods gave the majority of curries a 'common' base flavour.

Could this be the answer to the missing 5% 

SnS

The jelly has come up before on here, Haldi I think it was who was shown it, IIRC it didn't actually do a lot.  As for the spiced oil that rings true with what I have been told by different chefs, they don't do it because of health and safety.

I don't think he was referring to jelly ... just an oily chicken/lamb stock.

for me it's got to be something circumstantial as Haldi suggested ie something the restaurant trade does that we would not naturally do at home.

i've tried the chicken stock following a prompt by currytester. it certainly produces a very different taste. it's not the taste i'm after though. our end point is clearly not the same and this is very likely not helping.

i do feel we need restraint on over spicing (prominent in traditional cooking) and probably need to work at our recipes more - too much emphasis has been on the base.

the biggest improvement i've seen in the last few weeks has been to fry the spices in free water (added to the tom puree) - observing the BIR chef in action however he adds the spices dry. it's the understanding of the "how" that we perhaps need a little more on.

the other thing to possibly add is my wife's prefers my curries to the TA version. she was not brought up on curry so is not as strange as u 1st think. what i'm getting at is that we're probably already at the same level (in terms of standard) just left or right of the mark a little. for example recently deciding to add a little more chilli has got me closer.

Adrian,

yes (still lives on in my memory) - I did make my own chicken stock and found it very hard to put the gel into the base (i chilled it to get rid of the fat - there is no animal fat in the TA's i buy and the taste i love).

The only possibility if chicken stock is used widely was that mine was too concentrated (ie too much for the rest of the base). The trouble is I don't believe it's used widely or if it is - it partly accounts for the curries that I don't like no question. just personal taste on what i've been brought up on.