p.s. Just remembered, one thing I found different about this base was that I felt it left me more 'garlicky' (i.e. breath etc) than I've felt with other bases, or indeed restaurant curries in general.

Stew, I take it your recipe is based on using a hand held blender, thus not removing the stuff from the pot? I feel that because I transferred it from the pot to the jug blender, this was perhaps where my oil deficiency crept in (I think I rinsed the stock pot before putting the blended ingredients back in, and might have lost some in the blender).

R.

Greg - I made two chicken ceylons, a mixed vegetable ceylon* and a mixed vegetable chilli masala (only four chillies, not ten!), from another site, although the veggie ones were based on chicken recipes. Not quite following the rules, heh, but tasted great.

* - across the three ceylons, I managed to use the whole wee pot of cream and the whole lemon's juice, which I was most pleased with.  :-)  Even managed to put a good dent in my creamed coconut block! :-)

R.

So I made four curries with some of this base last night (two each for me and my girlfriend, one each for last night, one each for tonight). They were fantastic, as usual (!)  I'm always trying different recipes, so can't really comment on what I thought of the base versus other bases because I have no benchmark curry really, but I did like the fact that the base was smaller, and pretty simple to make, so will no doubt use this base recipe again.

Next time I make this base I will:

? Have a better idea of what consistency I'm aiming for (ended up adding more water last night and it 'seemed' right). Might experiment with adding stock instead of water, although I can't use chicken stock as my girlfriend is a vegetarian.

? Experiment with longer simmering (I let it simmer a while more before I used it last night, but would be interesting giving it a few hours).

? Blend in two batches, as I think the whole thing was a bit much for my blender to do a good job on, even though it fitted in the jug (re-blended it before use last night as it wasn't quite smooth enough, I thought).

R.

Quote from: Cory Ander on July 05, 2007, 12:19 PM
and that's plain "single" tomato soup, not "cream of" tomato soup, RWR!

What brand, CA?  ;-)

Re: the colour - mine was quite a light colour, orangey, when I blended it (gave it a good few minutes in the blender, with rests so as not to blow the poor thing up), but got darker not long after I started simmering, ending up a sort of medium brown with an orangey tint.

R.

Did you add much water along the way, Greg?

I simmered for an hour before adding spices, then about another 20-25 minutes. Would have tried longer, but it was after midnight by this time and I still had to cool the base down and refrigerate it.

R.

I made this base last night as my frozen stocks of the last base I made had run out. One thing I was concerned about was that the onion absorbed the 1/2 cup of oil and then when it was pureed with the tomatoes etc and put back in the stock pot it wasn't very oily. I added about a tablespoon of veg oil about half way through simmering, but didn't want to push it, and didn't see any oil rising to the top after about 20 minutes cooking post-spice adding. Wasn't quite sure what sort of soup to aim for consistency-wise :-0, so kept adding water along the way and ended up with roughly a litre and a half of sauce. It's not runny?maybe sort of yoghurt-like consistency (just a little weight to it). At a guess, it could take a little more water, but not sure. Also wasn't sure how much stirring to do, so I erred on the side of more stirring to make sure nothing stuck to the bottom of the stock pot.

R.

Slightly off-topic query concerning this thread having been moved to the Trainee Chefs / Beginners Questions area: I'm not disputing my being a beginner, or my question being a question :-) but just think if it gets some useful replies, surely it would be better in the Spices area where I posted it. I'm just going by the fact that before posting, I looked for a Garam Masala thread in the spices area, but didn't look in the beginner questions area, and of course didn't try a search because I assume it would come up with many, many results. I can see now that there are a couple of other threads about spices in this area, where I wouldn't necessarily have thought to look for them because there is a dedicated Spices area.

Cheers,


Richard.

Eek, I may have read the first one perhaps ('Blanching Onions'). I think I've just seen pre-cooked onions mentioned in some of the longer posts.

Did you have any further experience in this department yourself after the second link/thread 'To Fry or Not to Fry' seemed to come to an end (somewhat unconclusively)?

Cheers,

Richard.

From reading many of the posts on the forum, I get the impression that perhaps the majority of the posters use bought garam masala instead of making their own? Just wondering what the most popular types are, or from the people who make their own what recipes they use.

Garam Masala was probably the first Indian spice I bought, before I actually got into cooking curries, just to see what it was like because I knew the name, but when I got into cooking, my first book was a Pat Chapman one which recommended making your own GM, which I duly did, expanding my spice rack about fifteenfold in the process. I'm thinking about chucking what's left of it now and making some fresh stuff, as I've been using it for a good few months and there's still a fair bit left, and I'd like to try something else and make use of some more of the whole spices I bought previously before they get too old.

Something that's interested me when reading GM recipes though is whether or not to leave the cardamom pods in when grinding the ingredients up. Some recipes have said to leave the pods in, but most have said just use the seeds.

I was thinking about trying the GM recipe from the Shish Mahal cook book, which is quite a simple one (only four or five spices I think).

Cheers,


Richard.