I'm not sure how much your 8 onions weigh, but my first reaction on reading your ingredient list is what a lot of veg you have for only 8 onions. Videos from restaurant kitchens often show huge stock pots filled with onions and not much more than half a pepper and a couple of carrots thrown on top, so you really have to keep in mind base gravy ingredients should be 98/99% onions IMHO.

Butter is a new one on me, but if you like that flavour in your base then go for it. Have never seen that in another base recipe though.

The bhagar (fried part) doesn't have any fixed rules as far as I can see, just keep it in proportion and remember it's a base so shouldn't be strongly spiced and if it's turning red then you've got way too much tomato.  I always tend to look back on videos from real restaurant kitchens and check my proportions are in the right ball park, as the trouble is there's a kind of Chinese whispers effect with people copying someone else's recipe from a forum then making their own changes and over the generations of changes you can end up with quite a departure from what the restaurants are using. An example in my opinion is the way a lot of folks seem to scale down the amount of onions and water to suit a smaller pot but still want to add as much other veg as they saw in that huge pot in the video from the restaurant kitchen.

Like I said, I'm not sure how much your 8 onions weigh, but it seems to me you're making a pretty small batch of base and so "less is more" should be the order of the day to keep the other ingredients in proper proportions.

Bit harsh Chewy - the guy's just asking for thoughts on some ideas. If folks are criticised for discussing curry cooking on this site what will we end up with? , "Quail Eggs Weekly"??  I think we should welcome and encourage the debates on curry cooking as they are certainly in short supply these days.

Spadge, ignore my previous answer as for sure you're not undercooking your onions, quite the opposite. There is no reason you should boil them till they're brown. Falling apart or "melting" is the normal description. The 90 mins hard boil Chewy mentioned should do it. My suggestion of cooking longer was because many seem to have been misled by a long since departed self-styled guru who insisted for years all you needed was a "low simmer for an hour" when cooking onions in base gravy. 

The harsh flavour you're suffering with, could it be the spices I wonder? You know base isn't meant to taste like a finished curry or to taste sweet on its own, so it's never going to taste great compared to a curry made by frying onions.

The only other tip I could suggest is to remember that on a home hob the final dish will take longer to cook than you see in videos from restaurants, who have high btu burners which manage to achieve the deceptive trick of supplying a lot of heat without too much temperature (sounds impossible I know). At home, it seems to me, we have to cook longer to get the spices in the final curry cooked out because the limited heat of a domestic stove causes the pan temperatures to dip quicker and longer when those ladles of base sauce are added.

Good luck, I'm sure you will find the result you're looking for.

I think there are two very different ways of cooking curries which you're touching on in your post above. Traditional Indian home cooking uses onions fried in oil and caramelised to some degree and works well for small portion numbers with a cooking time that's just way too long for a restaurant to consider. BIR cooking, which is an assembly line approach where the bulk of the cooking is done ahead of time and the final dishes can be knocked out in under ten mins, uses a boiled onion sauce.

It's no surprise your typical Asian home cook doesn't know anything about BIR method - much as we might think they are all experts on how restaurants cook it's pretty understandable that in the typical Indian / Pakistani home they're cooking traditional recipes and have no need for boiling onions to make base sauce.

On your point about decanting your onions and refreshing the water to make a milder end result, I think you're missing the point. If you have harsh flavours in your base gravy you're simply not boiling the onions long enough / hard enough. Pouring the flavour away to water it down with new water is just wasteful and masking the true problem imho.

I'm gonna pre-cook some potatoes and carrots following this method so I can add them to my already cooked and frozen curry sauce portions and make quick veggie curries. I wonder what other veggies should feature in a veggie curry. When I've ordered them in restaurants before it has seemed like a supermarket bag of mixed frozen veg was used, as peas, sweetcorn, etc were all in there...Thanks for the method JB.

A couple of chicken Ceylon tonight, from a batch cooked past weekend. In fact I stirred a spoon of Naga paste into mine, so I guess that makes it a chicken Naga Ceylon.

The garden's full of mushrooms again, easily several hundred out there if not more. Sigma would be in his element, but I'm not gonna eat any!

I was inspired by Onions tantalising picture of his curry and tried this tonight. Made with whole chicken legs but my fussy family insisted the chicken was cut off and returned to the pot, so it looks a bit messy with all that chicken leg meat in there.

Having eaten it now I don't really see what the fuss is about. Sorry folks, it's a perfectly nice traditional curry, but no great difference to any other traditional curry I've cooked before and frankly not worth all the stirring when I can knock out BIR curries so easily.

Just made a staff curry with reference to H4ppy Chris's YouTube vid and was struck how similar (identical?) the recipe was to this one posted years ago by ifindforu. Seems the BIRs do all cook their staff curries the same way.

Quote from: Garp on March 19, 2017, 07:03 PM

You've inspired me Garp. Scanning back through this thread to check a detail I spotted the pics of your pizzas and they look so spot on I will have to get a batch of dough on the rise so I can have pizza tomorrow. Finally liberated some freezer space so can get restocked with dough balls.

Becoming a mod on this site is enough to kill even the keenest member.