I'd always found aubergines a pain to prepare as they soak up any amount of oil and so are difficult to initially cook.

Trying to use them without an initial cooking (i.e. at a higher temperature than boiling) yielded indifferent results and on one occasion the damn things never cooked through.

Then one day I thought about what you were trying to do with the initial frying (assuming it was not to get them to soak up oil!) and came to the conclusion that it was largely to caramelise the surface and ensure that enough of the intercellular walls of the inside of the fruit have broken that it will cook through even if it is only heated to boiling point in a thick sauce (my failed cooking was in a vegetarian lasagna).

I decided to try grilling the sliced aubergine and have never looked back. The result (in the finished dish) is exactly the same as if they had been fried (although obviously they will add no oil so an adjustment may be necessary).

It's easy to grill them to a beautiful, even, golden colour and now I never put off making dished that I love but avoided because of the pain of trying to fry the aubergines without starting a global oil crisis.

One word of warning, though: If you forget to check aubergines have an unusual property that they can become burned to a frazzle without making any significant smell in the vicinity so make sure you watch them.

Sometimes I like to have a very simple meal of rice and one dish, but more often I like to have a variety of differnet dishes, particularly vegetables.

It's obviously impractical to cook 5 or six dihes just for one or two people, so the technique I use now is to make a large batch of each dish and freeze portions in those non-stick 'muffin' tins you can buy (they are a little deeper than the 'fairy cake' ones.

Once the food is frozen, you can decant it into plasitc freezer bags, either having a bag for each dish, or making up meals by adding a 'lump' of each dish to a bag.

Then, when you fancy 'an Indian', you just place them around the edge of a plate and microwave. Add rice in the middle, and you have a fairly complex meal in around 15 mins.

Since no curry I have ever tried has been damaged by freezing, this is an excellent way to enjoy really good food even when you have little time for preparation.

Although the membership of this forum is now approaching 100, there seems to be little traffic.

The same lack of traffic is apparant on uk.food...indian.

If any members have tried any of the recipies or techniques? posted here please make the effort to post a report, even if you are generally not given to making posts.

Getting a constant flow of traffic is important to any site, because if people keep checking and find there's nothing new to see, they stop bothering, and the site withers.

Someone's gone to a lot of trouble to create this site for us (thanks), so please make an effort to make it a sucess.

(Even posting a reply to this thread telling me to stop nagging would be a start )

I have noticed that a very great many dishes contain the spices:

Turmeric (Haldi)
Cumin (Jeera)
Corriander seeds
Salt

in roughly the proportion 1/1/2/1 respectively.

I grind up a weeks worth of this mixture at a time and keep it in a tightly stoppered jar.

Chicken Kovalam

Ingredients

2 Chicken breasts cut into pieces
1 good handful of corriander
8 Chillis, deseeded, despined and washed
6 tbls Muttly's basic curry sauce
1 med onion finely sliced
2 tsp Starting spices
1 cube frozen pureed garlic/ginger

Method

1 Fry onion until golden
2 Add defrosted garlic/ginger and fry for a minute
3 Add starting spices and fry for half a minute
4 Place corriander (stalks included) with chillis in a blender with just enough water to get it to puree, and blend
5 Add this puree together with the basic sauce, and allow to cook for a couple of minutes
6 Reduce heat to a bare simmer and add chicken pieces
7 Cook until chicken is don (about twenty minutes)

Notes

This is not actually an authentic dish, but it isn't a resturaunt one either.

Some time ago, I discovered that the heat from a chilli actually comes from the spines, rather than the seeds as is commonly supposed. I've always loved the flavour of chillis, but had to accept very hot dishes if I wanted to get it. With the discovery mentioned in the thread; "A Note about Chillis", I have managed to produce a dish with a very strong chilli flavour, but far less heat than one would expect.

Although this is certainly not a resturaunt dish, it does contain some of my basic curry sauce.

It is named after a place I stayed at in Kerala a few years back, and after which I can find no other dish named.

The best chillis to use for this dish (IMO) are the thin ones, about 2-6 cms in length.

See seperate thread for "starting spices"

I have not found it necessary to add any garam masala at the end of this dish, as the flavours of the corriander and chilli are enough for me, but you may care to experiment with this. I intend to in due course.

I have also made this dish with chick peas instead of chicken, and it proved to be a popular accompanyment.

Many people think that the heat from a chilli comes from the seeds.

This is not true. It actually comes from the spines.

Of course, since the seeds are in close contact with the spines, they tend to have a lot of the 'heat' on them.

If you really love the flavour of chilli, as I do, the best way to get this is to cut chillis in half, scrape out the seeds and all the spines and finally, wash the chillis.

The washing is most important as otherwise you retain a lot of the active ingredient that you've smeared all over the flesh

You can use far more chillis prepared in this way without getting as much heat as even half a whole chilli.

It's always best to make up a batch of garlic/ginger with a blender/hand blender/mixer, and freeze it. It's nigh on impossible to make a paste of these ingredients (especially the ginger) in small quantities.

Although various recipies call for different ratios of these ingredients, unless one of them is a particular focus of the dish, I find a 50/50 mix works well (of course, you may prefer a different ratio or even more than 1).

Whenever required, I get about 150 grms each of peeled ginger and garlic, chop them up, place them in the container that comes with a hand blender with some oil, and puree them. I then use some, and freeze the rest in an ice cube tray.

I also make some cubes with chilli added before pureeing, as fresh chilli has a better flavour than dried, and a little is appropriate in many dishes.

Potato and Cauliflower with Fennel and Onion Seeds

Ingredients

800   grams   Potatos
600   grams   Cauliflower
1   inch   Root ginger
6   cloves   Garlic
2   tsp   Whole fennel seeds
2   tsp   Onion seeds
350   grams   Tomatoes, finely chopped
1   tbls   Ground coriander seeds
?   tsp   Haldi
?   tsp   Chilli powder
1   tsp   Salt

Preparation[/b]

1 Blend ginger and garlic until smooth
2 Cut potato into pieces about 2cm square
3 Break cauiflower into pieces of similar size to potatos
4 Start to par boil potatos and cauliflower
5 Fry fennel and onion seeds for a few seconds
6 Add tomatoes, ginger, garlic, coriander, haldi, chilli powder and salt
7 Cook for 5 minutes
8 Add poatos and cauliflower and stir in gently
9 Cover pan and cook until vegatables are done as you prefer

Notes[/b]

About 3/4 of a tin of plum tomatoes works well.

Chicken Vindaloo

Ingredients

2   lbs   Chicken pieces
3   cloves   Garlic
2 ?   cm   Root ginger
3   tbls   White wine vinegar
1   tbls   Treacle
1   tsp   Haldi
2      Chillis
?   tsp   Fenugreek seeds
1   tsp   Mustard seeds
1   tbls   Coriander seeds
1   tsp   Jeera seeds
1   pinch   Asafoetida
?   tsp   Chilli powder
1   lb   Small potatoes
6   tbls   Mustard oil
4?    Minced onions
3?    Tomatoes
2   tbls   Fresh coriander
2   tsp   Salt

Preparation[/size]

1 Blend garlic, ginger, wine vinegar, treacle, turmeric and chillis to a paste
2 Add salt, ground fenugreek, mustard, coriander and jeera seeds
3 Rub paste into chicken and leave for 3 hours
4 Cut potatoes into bite sized pieces and boil until just tender
5 Fry the onions until golden, then add asafoetida
6 Add de-seeded and chopped tomatoes and fry until oil surfaces
7 Add the chicken and marinade and cook for 10 minutes, stirring occasionally
8 Cover and simmer for a further 10 minutes
9 Add potatoes and cook until chicken is tender – about 10 minutes


Notes[/size]
This is not truly authentic for two reasons:

1) The original dish was made with pork
2) It did not contain potatoes.

Of course, thie recipe is easily modified to remove these anomalies.

I've made this quite a few times, and it's quite popular.

It certainly does not need to be made hot.

I've got a couple I'd like to post, but they are not returaunt style dishes.

It would seem to be a good idea to split them up.

A while back I was thinking about the chicken pieces you get in BIR's nowadays (at least down here in the South, it's almost invariably chicken breast), and I realised, that they do not fry the meat at all.

When you get a BIR chicken dish, you can quite clearly see the shape of the chicken as it has been cut from a breast fillet. If you fry one of those, the shape of the piece of meat will change as the fibres tighten, no matter how gently you do it.

I tried this the next time I made a dish with a sauce. Just cut? the chicken into pieces and added them, uncooked, to a very, very gently simmering sauce.

The result was very tender chicken with exactly the texture you get in a BIR. This is one aspect of BIR cooking that I think it is well worth emulating.

Of course, chicken breast is not the best flavoured meat, so it's probably better not to use it exclusively.

This sauce seems to me to be a base from which you can make a large number of BIR style curries. I've only tried to make a Madras so far, and it seemed to me to be indistinguishable from a good takeaway example.

Ingredients

4 Large Onions (or 8 small ones - probably better, but hard to get hold of at the moment)
200ml vegetable Oil
1/2 tsp aesofetida
1/2 tsp chilli
3 tsp Turmeric
3 tsp Ground cumin
1 tbls peeled/chopped garlic
1 tbls peeled/chopped ginger
1 can tomatoes

Method

Heat oil until garlic and ginger just sizzle quietly
Cook garlic and ginger for about 8 mins until almost browned
Add aesofetida, turmeric, cumin and chilli and continue cooking for 2 mins
Add onions, sliced and stir to coat with oil
Add enoughg water to nearly cover the onions
Boil on a gentle simmer for an hour
Add the can of tomatoes
Puree with a hand blender (or in a food processor if you haven't got one)
Cook (covered) on a very gentle simmer for 4 hours. This sauce is sufficiently runny that it will not gloop or stick, so just needs a very occasional stir - in fact, I'm not sure it even needs that.

You should now have a sauce from which you can make a wide variety of BIR style curries.

A version without tomatoes is obviously needed for some sauces.

I've tried Madras, and verified that by gradually adding some sauce to some cooking youghurt/cream, you will get the creamy type of sauce needed for a Passanda/Korma/Malay (although these would need the non-tomatoe version).
Don't try to add youghurt/cream to the sauce, it won't work - it'll taste OK, but the youghurt/cream will never blend completely and will look slightly curdled.

Add some coconut from a block and colouring to a creamy version that to get a tikka massala sauce.

Having only a couple of days ago posted a thread calling for people to consider freeing themselves from the desire to emulate resturant food, it might seem a little odd that I'm now posting a thread on making a resturant curry sauce.

It is just that after posting the thread, I once again started musing on how to get what the average British Indian Resturant (BIR) gets. Instead of attacking the problem on the basis of ideas and sauces other people had already posted, or, indeed, old attempts of my own, I tried to think about what must go on in BIR's, many of whom have very small kitchens, and yet manage to produce a large range of dishes, often to an excellent standard.

One thing is for sure: they can't prepare each dish from scratch, marinating the meat first as one would with Indian home cooking. Considering what's possible, and what I've seen from a couple of open plan takaway kitchens, each of which seemed to have an unbelievably small area available for the number of dishes they could come up with, I came to the following conclusion (which, I'm sure many others have come to before - hence this sub forum).

They obviously have one or two basic sauces from which all other sauces are derived (probably one with youghurt, and one without). These sauces will be minimally spiced. The only spces that will be added are those that need to cook for a long time with the other ingredients in order to completely combine, and gain that elusive depth that BIR sauces seem to have.

Clearly, a restuarant preparing as many dishes as the average BIR will want a basic sauce with no keynote spices, as these would interfere with the spicing of the individual dishes.

From my experience, it seemed to me that these minimum spices are probably limited to aesofetida, turmeric and cumin. Corriander may also be one of these base spices.

The other important point about BIR cooking is that it is obviously impossible for them to keep cooking up small batches of basic sauce. They'd get into a terrible state trying to keep up with varying demnds. Neither, I'm pretty sure, will they throw away the left over sauce at the end of each sitting.

My guess is that they keep a large pot of basic sauce on the go all the time, and top it up as the level goes down with batches that they either cook on a continuing basis, prepare and chill/freeze or even buy in.

So the sauce they are actually using could well contain very small quantities that are weeks old, with ever larger proportions of newer batches. Whether or not the presence of elements of the sauce that may have been being cooked for days actually has any effect on the flavour/texture I don't know.

One further point. The sauce must be sufficiently liquid that it can be left without glooping or sticking. If there was any tendency to stick, then at some point it would stick, and the whole system would eventually grind to a halt.

So, this is what I did.

Heated about 200ml of oil (yes, I know most basic sauces use more, but bear with me - I couldn't see any logical reason to, and this worked).
Added a level tablespoon of chopped ginger, and a similar quantity of chopped garlic. The temperature of the oil was such that the garlic and ginger made a quiet sizzeling sound, and gradually turned brown over the course of about ten minutes. This is to allow it to cook thoroughly without burning.

About two minutes before the garlic and ginger was browned, I added: 1/2 tsp aesofetida, 3 tsp Turmeric, 3 tsp ground cumin, and 1/2 tsp ground chilli.

Two minutes later I added four large sliced onions and stirred them around to let the oil cover them (don't know why - superstition, perhaps). I then added enough water to almost cover the onions.

This mixture was then allowed to simmer quite gently for an hour.

At the end of the hour a can of chopped tomatos was added - simmering continued.

An hour later this mixture was pureed with a hand blender.

Up to this point I had been cooking it in a large stock pot so that I could use the blender without covering te kitchen with sauce. I now transfered the mixture to two saucepans. I added a teaspoon of ground corriander to one, and set them both on a bare simmer, and left them for 4 hours, just giving them the occasional stir to make sure they weren't sticking (they weren't).

At the end of this time, what did I have ?

Well, two pots of something that looked exactly like the sauce that a typical Madras or vindaloo comes in. The taste, whilst obviously not being anything like a good curry (although I'd swear I've been dished up with a "Madras" that was made with something like this), has that unmistakeable depth that BIR curries have.

The sauce with the corriander has a slightly brighter, fruitier flavour. I don't think it was necessary to add it to the basic sauce, but it wouldn't do any harm if your final curry should have corriander flavour. It seems to be a very robust spice that does not degrade with long cooking.

The next step was to try the sauce to actually make a dish.

To do this I simply fryied some onion until golden, added some diced chicken and cooked until the chicken was done. Five minutes before the end I added a half tsp of garam masala.

The result was something that as far as I could tell cound not be distinguished from a BIR Madras. I've yet to try the experiment, but I'm pretty sure that if I put it in a foil container, and offered it to someone alongside a good takeaway, they would never be able to say which dish came from the resturant. (They might be able to differentiate it from one that came from a particular resturant with which they were familair, of course).

Well, sorry for the ramble, but this is something I've been trying to do, off and on, for a long time, and I wanted to share some of the thoughs behind what I did, as well as the recipe. I'll post a short version as well.

(Edit: I've just noticed some very similar sentiments to those expressed below as I read some more of the current posts here. Sorry for the duplication.)

Whilst perusing uk.food+drink.indian, I came across a pointer to this site.

It look good, but I notice that two of the forums mention "resturant" recipes and sauces. I wonder how many of the members here feel as I do (now) that the perpetual search for an "authentic" resturant curry is becoming a bit of a tyranny that is preventing people from appreciating what they are cooking as good? or even excellent Indian food in its own right.

I posted this in uk.food+drink.indian. I'd be interested in the views of any others who feel that they have freed themselves from the apparantly futile quest to exactly emulate Indian resturant dishes.

Posted------
Last night I went to an Indian resturant for the first time in a while. I've
been cooking cooking my own Indian food for quite a while now, so haven't been
eating it out as much.

I was really looking forward to having some of the "real thing".

We went to a very good resturant - nothing flashy, just reliably good food. The
quality of what we ordered was well up to standard, but, as I began to eat it, I
found myself rather disappointed. I suddenly realised that I actually prefer the
Indian food I prepare myself!

For quite a long time, I tried all sorts of things to make my curries
"authentic" - a ridiculous notion since the food you get in Indian resturants in
this country bears little resemblance to the food you get in India, but, like
most people here, I got my first (well, first few hundred) tastes of Indian food
in English Indian resturants, and I always wanted to be able to recreate those
dishes.

It was a while back now that I realised that I'd *never* recreate a typical
Indian resturaunt dish, because I'd *never* use the amount of gee/oil that they
use in theirs. Nevertheless, it was these I was still judging my results
against.

Now I've had this epihany, I feel a real freedom to push the envelope further,
and experiment with the multitude of flavours and recipes from the sub
continent, rather than trying to emulate the rather limited range of dishes that
one sees in the typical British "Indian", delicious though these may be.

Of course, I'll never stop going to Indian resturants, but it will no longer be
to sample food that I am trying to emulate.