Quote from: jb on July 23, 2014, 08:36 PM

Finally take another pan,add a chef's spoon of oil and add a very finely chopped garlic clove and brown it.Tip this into the gravy(rinse the garlic pan out with a spoon of gravy).This seemed to give the gravy a fantastic smokey like flavour.Simmer the sauce for about half an hour and the oil should begin to rise.

JB, is the base gravy blended after the addition of the garlic, or does the garlic just stay there in small pieces which show up in the customer's final dish? If the latter, I guess it's pot luck how much garlic makes its way into each dish cooked, depending how much gravy is left in the pot when you order.

Finally, in the photo you posted (duplicated below), is the sliced garlic floating on top of the tikka masala added during the making of that dish, or has it come from the base gravy? Is it definately finely chopped garlic, not finely sliced garlic which is added to the base?

One last thing:

Quote from: jb on July 23, 2014, 08:36 PM
3 kilo white onions(any sort,they chop them so it cooks quicker and it doesn't affect the taste)

They slice them so they cook quicker, then they cook them for a total of 3hrs??  Can you ask next time you're there how much longer they think it would take to cook the base if the onions were left whole?

I thought it was 1 tsp of a paste made with coriander, chilli and lemon juice in the proportions given, not 4 whole tablespoons of lemon juice in one curry (clearly ridiculous)

For KFC-like chicken (soft and tender, coating fried enough but not too much, moist and not too greasy) you can use this cooking method:

- use a trivet in a pressure cooker to steam (not boil) chicken portions in chicken stock for 25 mins at pressure. This means you're pressure cooking the chicken in steam.
- let the chicken cool
- make a wash of 2 parts buttermilk to one part egg white with 1 tsp vanilla essence per 250ml of wash
- dip chicken pieces in wash,  then your breading mix, then wash then breading and rest for 2 hours in fridge till chicken has a wet appearance (no dry spots)
- deep fry 160C for 3 mins
- rest in low oven at 80C for 20 mins to warm thru

You'll have to use your choice of breading mix (refer to the KFC forum or improvise) but as a rule of thumb to one cup of flour add 1 tbsp sugar, 1 tbsp salt, 1 tbsp msg, 2 tbsp mixed spices and herbs (pepper, sage, savory, ginger, coriander, cardamon, bay, cayenne, etc). Some well crushed cornflakes adds a nice texture to the coating but at the expense of absorbing more oil, so use judiciously.

In my experience anyone playing around trying to replicate kfc isn't short of their own ideas of what the spice mix should be, so knock yerself out! The cooking method is sound and makes the tenderest chicken without an over fried coating as happens if you try to deep fry coated chicken from raw. Don't fill your pressure cooker with oil unless you like hospital.

Quote from: Gav Iscon on August 03, 2014, 09:29 AM
I sort of agree but its not always the whole picture. Manjits Kitchen for example was brought up from Leeds and would have involved a stop over so the overheads mount up. I'm assuming that they'll have to pay to be at the event which won't be cheap also plus wages etc. 

But this is just the point, it's the opposite of what street food should be. Once you're paying transport, and the cost of a pitch, plus in the case of Kerb (or similar event marketing types) you're effectively paying a marketing agency a fee you do indeed get to this high overhead business model and that is the *opposite* of street food!  Effectively these people are stealing the brand image of street food and hood winking the public, while serving up overpriced overhyped nonsense and I find it dishonest trading.

I've said my piece.

And yes, Harry Enfield, very clever guy and spot on.

Yeah I guess so. Well it never hurts for us to learn more about our ingredients anyway

Rant on.

I have to say I detest this new wave street food fad, all over hyped and over priced and run by yuppie career changers who've left the square mile and decided to re-invent streetfood as a high margin food sector supported by marketing bullshit.  Worst of the lot is Petra Barran's kerbfood.com who run events where their identikit traders descend en masse and fleece consumers at 6/7/8 quid per tiny portion of various trendy nonsense, complete with twitter and Facebook accounts buzzing away and faux decorated stalls (all in catastrophically unimaginatively identical styles) to support the rip off pricing.

Streetfood should be about low overheads and value pricing - at least it always was before Petra Barran and her new breed showed up. These damn yuppies have stolen a whole genre and through ubiquity and aggressive marketing have made consumers accept the new norm of a half sized portion with drink costing nearly a tenner.

Rant off.

Quote from: jb on August 02, 2014, 08:00 AM

Quote from: Donald Brasco on August 02, 2014, 05:39 AM
A small point of detail which JB might want to check next time he's back - coconut block typically has a big fat layer of solid coconut oil on top. Is it just the coconut block itself which is added to the base, or some of the coconut oil? Or maybe it was actually the oily part of the coconut block which was added?  This would help bring the oil level in this base up, but perhaps as Mick says it's just a feature of this recipe that there's not much oil?

http://www.ktc-edibles.com/shop.php?sec=prod&prod=90

This is the stuff he used,regular coconut block,just cut a bit off really.Not sure what you mean about coconut oil,it's just a solid,hard block,there's no oil,at least there's not in this brand which is the one I usually use myself.

Nearly every block of KTC coconut cream I've bought has been separated into cream and oil, maybe it's a function of the way it's stored during the supply chain, or maybe you just haven't noticed that the end part of your block is crumbly and a different colour. Well anyway it's not important I suppose, only that potentially your BIR might be deliberately adding one or other part of the block for some reason.

A small point of detail which JB might want to check next time he's back - coconut block typically has a big fat layer of solid coconut oil on top. Is it just the coconut block itself which is added to the base, or some of the coconut oil? Or maybe it was actually the oily part of the coconut block which was added?  This would help bring the oil level in this base up, but perhaps as Mick says it's just a feature of this recipe that there's not much oil?

Is that base "very thin like watery soup" ( from original JB post)?

Quote from: jb on July 23, 2014, 08:36 PM


The chef then explained that in the takeaway they leave the gravy like this(it's quite thick) and then add water to thin when they need it.It should be very thin,like watery soup.However when it hits the hot pan it will thicken.Finally take another pan,add a chef's spoon of oil and add a very finely chopped garlic clove and brown it.Tip this into the gravy(rinse the garlic pan out with a spoon of gravy).This seemed to give the gravy a fantastic smokey like flavour.Simmer the sauce for about half an hour and the oil should begin to rise.

Is the watering down of the base to "very thin like watery soup" done before the garlic is added and cooked for half an hour, or is the garlic added and cooked for 30 mins then later when the base is to be cooked with it's diluted till very thin? Seems like what's written above could mean either?