I run the risk here of creating a general yawn but I just searched the site for the word "umami" and it didn't come up.

I had always been taught that sweet, salty, sour and bitter were the fundamental 'tastes' with 'spicy-hot' and 'metallic' also tongue sensations but in a different category. I was taught that all other sensations from enjoyable food came from fragrance (smell) and texture.

Yet there seemed to be something missing. Some foods, and most notably a good BIR curry, have such a HUGE savory taste which can't be matched using any combination of the four basics or by the addition of herbal fragrances.

Monosodium glutamate (MSG) has no smell and although it is salty to taste its effect on flavour enhancement is certainly not due to saltiness - there had to be a missing taste component of a 'savory' nature - and probably more than one.

I now see that this is well known in the food industry and it has been given the name "umami" - there seem to be several components to be added in order to produce a balanced umami and this includes the smoky component often mentioned on here.

Understanding umami, or having an intuitive sense of it, seems to be a vital element in producing delicious dishes, and it is not just a matter of throwing in the right amount of MSG - there appear to be multiple ingredients which must be added to enhance the umami.

Where the recipes here have produced noble results I suggest that the right umami has been an essential component of that success.

If what I have said is old hat for you, I apologize; it is a revelation for me and possibly for a few others too. For anybody who complains that the "can't seem to get that restaurant taste" in their home-cooked food (Indian, Chinese whatever) the secret appears to lie here.

There is a wealth of information on the web if you just search under "umami" and there is even an "Umami Information Centre'.

Here is a theory about this "BIR" flavour, which seems so elusive in the hands of home-bound chefs, genuine Indian mothers and grandmothers and in recipes concocted by people such as Madhur Jaffrey, Kriss Dillon, J. Sainsbury or Fred Tesco!

Do the restaurants use some forbidden and deeply secret ingredient? Just as we watch a conjurer intently as he performs his trick, never able to see what he does that makes the difference; so we watch a BIR chef and attempt to duplicate his motions without the longed-for success. My previous best ever curry, made after reading this forum, missed the mark I was aiming for.

BIR curries are swimming in oil. The gravy medium IS oil. The taste is imparted to our mouth via oil (and is so intense!). OK, this oil may be concealed (disguised) in the thick base which is composed of mostly reduced onion and tomato, but oil is the medium in which the cooking took place and water was excluded (or at least highly controlled) so far as was possible.

Almost always, we use water for our cookery. The water extracts the essences from the ingredients (inefficiently), brings them to (approximately) 100 degrees C and does the heat exchange that is needed to cook the meat and the veggies at that temperature. Sure, we may start out frying but ultimately the meat and the veggies get simmer-cooked in water at the stated hundred degrees and with predominantly water interfacing the meat & veggies.

My opinion is that the BIR difference is tied to oil cooking vs. water cooking.

Suppose we substituted oil for the whole process? I tried as follows:

Fried onions till golden brown, fried garlic/ginger pur?ed in oil, fried those spices which can stand frying without losing their aroma, fried tomato paste (NOT crushed tomatoes because they will contain too much water) and, keeping the whole awash with oil at a temperature above 100 degrees (but never so hot as to carbonize or burn badly on the bottom), finally I slow fried the meat and whole veggies at close to 100 deg., adding the more vulnerable spices right near the end. Doing it this way I accomplished two vital things (1) cooked at a temperature above 100 degrees C which got a 'smoky taste' into the oil from the onions (2) then efficiently extracted the essential oils of the spices with an oil medium and transferred it to the meat and veggies via oil interface - and, finally, the flavours dissolved in the oil (which were able to go into the meat far more easily because they were much more concentrated in the oil than they would have been in water) and then the same flavours hit the mouth via the oil medium with such a huge TASTE compared to our water-cooked curries!

I'm not totally satisfied but I felt this was a quantum leap (for me anyway). I should have liked more smoky taste and I would have liked more aromatic spice bouquet, like cardamom especially, but the taste was the closest I have ever managed (in 1000+ attempts) and it was only a first go.

After cooking this way, you can by all means skim off oil for re-use, just as the restaurants do - and the recycled oil of course makes the next curry even tastier. Because there is a lot of reduced onion and tomato paste in the sauce, the extra oil is less easy to see, more easy to hide! But of course it is there and it's none too healthy either ? I suggest that is why oil cooking is kept as a secretive technique and those who enquire come away with a recipe guaranteed to do water-cooking. That also is why you shouldn't eat too much of this stuff and why Mdm. Jaffrey is so healthy.

Has anybody had a go at this one? Or maybe somebody could predict how it will turn out?

http://www.bbc.co.uk/food/recipes/database/porkvindaloo_89999.shtml

The use of mustard seed is interesting - any comments on that?

My impression is that TV curries have advanced a lot in the past few years (and I don't mean the frozen ones, though I supppose they have too!).

I am convinced that garlic and probably onions play a major part in "smokey taste". Also, I am always frustrated that I can't get a lot of "garlicy taste" into my cooking and so I made a new experiment. Because I believe garlic taste gets destroyed by over-cooking.

I blended a whole bulb of garlic with a thumb-sized piece of ginger, together with water and made a fine, thick puree.

On this occasion I was making a Thai curry so I fried onions in a LITTLE oil, with fresh chillies and curry powder I had bought in Malaysia (two table spoons, heaped). Fried a bit, all together, then added a can of coconut milk and salt. Stewed the lot for about 40 minutes, slowly.

Then, I took my puree and with a fair bit of oil, I fried it - swirling all the time. It smelled 'raw' and I kept on frying until the water was mostly gone and it was JUST starting to brown. Then I dumped this into the stew as I muttered "Take that!". Stirred and stopped cooking. Before serving I added a lot of basil leaves, chopped medium (basil aroma is quickly lost when heated, which most Italian chefs seem to ignore!).

This 'curry' tasted very nice. Not BIR but, the point is, the late addition of the garlic seemed to make a big difference and if I had flambe'd that puree, I might have got very very close to a good smokey taste! I say this and I contribute this because I felt I made progress and lost nothing by the late addition of the garlic/ginger.

Spotty

"And in his den you sometimes meet
With curry fit for man to eat"
Stone Talk by Sir Richard Burton 1865


I was raised in the UK during the 1940s and 50s to know curry as a yellow concoction, done up with raw curry powder and having raisins and bits of apple added; I had my first real curry in London in 1960. It was a chicken curry, off the bone, with pilau rice and it completely blew me away. That 'Pakistani' (today we'd say Bangladeshi) restaurant has long vanished but I often wonder how I would enjoy that same meal today. The restaurant was badly ventilated and had 'the smell' - the curry definitely had a lot of oil (probably ghee back then) and I don't doubt that the cooking methods were very similar to those we discuss here. Even then, there were quite a lot of 'Indian' restaurants in London (maybe twenty in the S. Ken/Chelsea/Fulham area) - but there were virtually none at all in the provinces that I ever saw. Tandoori had not yet arrived but although restaurants had big differences, most were pretty authentic 'BIR' tasting. You could get a good square meal of meat and rice for about five shillings (25p)! That was great for students.

Of course we tried to duplicate restaurant curries at home; buying numerous recipe books and of course you can predict the results!

Since then I reckon I have had well over a thousand curries - and I have tried them in lots of places. Regional tastes reflect local preferences of course - just as you are more likely to get a 'sweet' curry in the UK provinces (yuk). Japanese love curry, but it's more the Chinese sort - quite 'yellow' and not hot - but the supposed authentic curries I tried there were very mild and, yes, a bit sweet. Murthu's in Singapore is one of the very best I have ever had, but the absolute worst was in Iasi, Romania, where a Bangladeshi fellow had put up a sign - what he made wasn't recognizable as curry. I've had some excellent curries in the USA and Canada and, maybe surprisingly, a pretty good one in Phnom Penh, Cambodia. I have faith there are good curries in Australia but I haven't found one yet.

Can you tell that I suffer from a serious addiction?

Spotty

I came out of wartime Britain, where the food was just @*:-X*@  and had my first real curry in London (Chittagong Restaurant, West Brompton) in 1960 and became an instant addict.

Since that time I must have eaten thousands of curries: in Britain, India, France , Germany, USA, Canada, Australia, Malaysia, Singapore, HK, Japan, Korea and even in Romania (the very worst).

The best Indian curry ever was in Muthus Singapore ( http://muthuscurry.com/flash ) and all this time I have been trying, as people do here, to reproduce the 'authentic restaurant taste'. I have followed Madhoor Jaffrey and produced pleasant-tasting dishes that quite remind me of curry, but they do not have 'the taste' I crave. I thought I was onto something when I got Chris Dhillon's "Curry Secret"  but his curries don't make it in my hands - and I notice he doesn't fry his spices - adding raw cumin, garam marsalla and mehti leaves almost at the very end.

What I always noticed was the slightly BURNED taste that good curries often have. And, when you walk into a restaurant that has poor ventilation, the air smells of deliciously  singed spices!

I am a newcomer here so I shall show deference and I come here hoping to be educated. 

I make one observation: any good dish must have both taste and aroma just right. We talk a lot about taste (what the tongue does: sweet, sour, bitter, salty, hot) but far less about aroma. Many chefs get the taste balance right but they murder the aroma by destroying the spices and herbs with heat (Italian chefs are the worst: and they compensate by loudly [and threateningly] praising their food just before you eat it!).

Chinese chefs get a special taste and aroma on food by their 'flambe' technique wherein they literally set their wok on fire!

My question is: how do Indian chefs get that slightly burned taste and aroma into the good curries?