I finally made it along to Siras in Southall today. Simply mesmerising range of spices, it took me a full hour to browse the shop! The fresh produce left me a little underwhelmed with the quality (or lack thereof) as their green and red peppers were not firm and almost starting to wrinkle and the fresh coriander bunches had black rotting dead leaves mixed in with them.

Next I went 2 mins down the road to Quality foods and to be honest preferred the place. It's an even larger shop, nice light and airy atmosphere and the sample of fresh goods I browsed were better quality than in Siras. Both places had an ample number of mainly asian shoppers though, so they must be doing something right.

I somehow failed to find Mr Naga in either shop, but did pick up some alternatives. Thanks for the info Bob, these are definately the right places to be shopping for curry supplies.

Hi Jerry, could it be the brown version "with onion" uses an onion based cooked masala paste like the Zaal recipe, where the red version "without onion" uses a red uncooked masala like chewy's version, maybe with some extra yoghurt, cream, almond or coconut powder to mellow it out?

Yeah, 2am... Past my bedtime and not even close to waking up time I'm afraid  

Quote from: michael.t on May 26, 2014, 10:38 AM
I went to Smithfields meat market a couple of nights ago

The idea of this appeals to me, but getting up, into London & back out again before the congestion charge kicks in at 7am just doesn't seem possible to my body-clock!

Ta Ed

Looks good Garp. What price is brisket from the butchers these days? The supermarkets seem to be pricing it as a premium cut lately, which is a laugh considering it used to be unfashionable and cheap. No doubt some TV chef is to blame for making it trendy.

Hard to know what's real and what's a wind up, maybe the mythical ebook will include a twist when it finally hits the presses - but will any of us still be young enough to chop an onion?

Quote from: Secret Santa on May 25, 2014, 10:22 AM

I can't wait for Chris to reveal his magic, never seen before paste so that I can point to a post from this forum - probably from very early on - that shows there ain't nothing new in this old BIR game.

Oil, G&G paste, mix powder and tomato puree apparently.

Yep Chewy's recipes always deliver IMHO.  Not sure he always gets credited for his contribution to this forum, for example he was the first to mention the use of akhini stock in a base gravy which now seems to be cropping up all over the place. One of the few guys who knows what they're talking about.

PS Thinking about it I'm fairly sure the first time I saw cabbage in a base sauce was chewy's 3hr / 1 hr base recipe, and that also seems to be becoming more widely adopted now...

Hi Chewy, couple of Qs if you don't mind?

Are the marinade 2 ingredients added to the same bag which contains Marinade 1 (plus chicken), or is the half marinaded chicken pulled out of the marinade 1 bag and added to a new bag with marinade 2 ingredients?

Is the mustard oil the KTC edible blended stuff which is a mix of rapeseed oil and mustard oil, or the small bottle of pure mustard oil which KTC sell? Is it to be preheated to smoking point and cooled before use?