Quote from: haldi on January 06, 2008, 04:23 PM
Looking very tasty
I've never used ground cinnamon in rice before
I'll have to try

I like it for Pilau because I think it gives a richer taste.  I never use cinnamon sticks anymore.  Besides, I also need to fight with my wife for them as she uses them quite regularly in her baking - sometimes more than once - and, somehow, I don't think she'd want all that extra flavoring and color in her baked goods!

Quote from: haldi on January 06, 2008, 12:55 PM
Hi AST
      Like everyone said:- Brilliant photos!
Boy, you sure like your curries hot
I like them hot, but not THAT hot!!
Thanks for the post
I put chilli sauce on nearly every meal
I use one, the other or both of these
Anyone else tried them?

Thanks Haldi.

For my curries (Indian, South African and Thai, anyway), I try and live by the "If you're not sweating, you're not eating" mantra.  Same goes for pretty much most of the other kinds of Thai food I eat--except the soups:  I like those about medium hot.

Funnily enough, I don't use hot sauce all that much.  I put it in a few dishes I make, and I'll occasionally get out the Tiger Sauce or Huy Font Sriracha "Rooster" sauce for the 2nd or 3rd round of leftover roasts of various sorts.  It's also good on fried potatoes.

I use Green and Red Tabasco sauce in my BBQ sauce and a couple of Cajun dishes I make (along with some Cayenne pepper and medium chilli powder).  I nearly always add some kind of Habanero sauce to salsa (store bought or home-made) and when I eat Mexican food out in the US (Mexican here is terrible...).  I've tried and like (in no particular order) Melinda's Extra Hot Sauce, Tropical Pepper Co's XXXXTRA Hot Habanero Sauce and El Yucateco's Chile Habanero Hot Sauce.  I'll put between 1/4 to a half a bottle into a session of salsa eating, so they don't last long!   I also have some Crystal Classic Habanero Sauce, but I haven't tried it yet.

A friend of mine used to be into hot sauces and so I've tried some of them like After Death and some of them I don't even remember.  I think a couple of them came up on the "hottest sauces" thread, but that was about 8-10 years ago now.

I've seen the one on the right, but never tried either of them.

Quote from: smokenspices on January 06, 2008, 07:21 PM

Will you be trying the gravy recipe?

I think based on what you said, this one is going to be what I use for my next batch of base within the next couple of weeks.  Won't have much of a chance to do much extra-curricular cooking for a while...

Sounds like it was a fantastic day out.  Thanks for sharing what you found.

Cheers.

Thanks for all the responses, folks.  First batch of finished stuff frozen today, so I'll be using as many of your tips as possible.

Cheers.

Haldi,

Very interesting experiments.  I'd be interested in hearing more about your journey as you zero-in on the results.  I think having more of the "if I add that, I get this effect" in the discussions will probably help a lot of people too, so please don't just wait to post your finished recipe.

Cheers,

ast

Had to cook the remainder of my batch this morning so it wouldn't go bad.  I wanted to see if I could duplicate (or come pretty close) to the results from last time.  I think it was ok, and I'm not 100% sure if this is really a phall or a hot vindaloo, because I only tasted a bit of it when I was cooking.

This time, I used my 1/4 cup measure and covered the bottom of it with garlic granules and added roughly 40ml of oil so it wasn't quite full.  I also changed the spice mix slightly based on what I had left in the cabinet.  Once I eat the finished curry (which, unfortunately will need to be frozen/thawed first), I'll have a better judge of how hot it was.  From the cook's taste I had, it might end up being a low-end phall, but it didn't seem as hot as the one I had in London (which was 2 years ago, so my memory may be a little off too...)

Revised Spice Mix

• 1 tsp salt
• 1 tsp hot chilli powder
• 3 tsp cayenne pepper powder
• 1 tsp hot chilli flakes
• 8 red thai chillies (dried, then rehydrated in water for about 12 hrs and chopped finely)
• 1 tsp garam masal (heaped)
• 1/2 tsp ground cumin (heaped)

I then made it into a paste using 30-50ml of curry base and continued to make as above.  Here's some pictures of the missing steps too.



I think there was a little more base/spice mix this time since I didn't have so many teaspoons of spices, therefore it's a little thinner than last time.


I didn't calculate quite right, and I only had about 350ml of base left to make this dish.  This may have served to throw some of the other proportions off too, but I think it still tasted good.


This is the Phall just before I added the meat.  Still a bit thin, but was guessing as to how long it would take to heat the meat and thicken to the proper consistency.



Note that my rice is suffering from my experiment that I posted in my pilau rice recipe thread.  You can read more about it over there:  https://curry-recipes.co.uk/curry/index.php/topic,2233.msg19245.html#msg19245 if you want to have a giggle.

The final verdict is that I think this is certainly the way to prepare the finished curry, so the next experiment will be to use a different base and this technique to see what happens.  I'll post experiment #2 in the next couple of weeks when I'm making a new batch of base.

I did this today and tried my turmeric idea.  I was going to edit the original post, but I don't seem to have that option.  Can one of the moderators do it, please?

Add 1 tsp turmeric after sauteeing the onions and before you add the rice.  Continue as per the recipe.  If you do, your rice should turn out like this:


Now, I thought I'd go "whole hog", as they say, and do the red/green food coloring thing to prove that it can look like restaurant rice.  Unfortunately, I've clearly never done it using this pan/amount of rice before, so I added too much.


The finished rice obviously turned out with too much color, and where the red and green mixed, it ended up almost black (appetizing, isn't it?).  I won't make that mistake again...


If you're going to do the food coloring thing with this recipe, I believe the following amounts should work and give you perfect, restaurant-looking rice:

• 1/4 tsp red diluted in 1 tsp of water
• 1/4 tsp green diluted in 1 tsp of water

Obviously, you don't want to cross the colors, leading to nearly blackend badness.  Most of you probably know this already, but I wasn't as careful as I should've been, and Bobby said we should start posting our mistakes too.

I'm also not sure if I added a tad too much oil in the beginning or if it was a result of adding 2 tsp of extra liquid, but the rice ended up too wet.  Of course, maybe it was the loss of all the extra steam/warmth when I was taking the picture too... Hard to say exactly.

I'm going to experiment with the colors again next time at both the same place and earlier in the process to see which give better results.  I'll post what I find out when I get a chance.

That looks really great, unclebuck.  Interesting especially because I was just reading a forum about frying pans that mentioned using them for cooking naan as well as a few other types of flat bread.  It looks like great minds (theirs and yours--certainly not mine! think alike!

When I was visiting my mother, I noticed that she had a pizza stone.  I thought that this might be a useful thing to try with getting the proper crispness to naan as well.  It would certainly hold the heat better than a cookie sheet.

Our own naan experience was much like your earlier one.  We had some good results with yeast-based ones, but never got them quite done enough--even with the oven on full blast.  I think your method is likely to produce much more consistent results.

We don't have a tava, and I'd not heard of it before.  Ever tried whatever wikipedia's references to tava fry or tava masala mean?  I'm guessing you can use it similarly to a wok for quasi-stir-fry, but for the other, you just use it to make the final curry?

Thanks for sharing!

Here's some pictures from when I did this the other day.




I also got to thinking a little more about this recipe yesterday, and I think the next time I try it, I'm going to add about 1-2 tsp of turmeric to the water as well.  It should give it a nice yellow color that you see in many restaurants, but without the use of food coloring.  I don't know that it'll add all that much taste, but I'll let you know.

In case you're wondering, I always use a heavy duty 2 qt (US) Calphalon anodized, non-stick pan and accompanying glass lid for the rice.  It can be much trickier in thinner pans, and may result in some sticking to the bottom.  I've had to do this when cooking at other people's houses from time to time, but as long as the pot has a reasonably thick bottom (or a multi-layered one like some of the stainless steel brands like All Clad/Revere Ware/Faberware), it should work just fine.

Another thing:  if you end up with rice that's too sticky for your taste, just use a tad more oil when you're sauteeing the onions at the beginning.

I know this doesn't work that well with the gallery concept, but people posting curry video/photos could always link them in from another site (like flikr, google, personal blog, etc.) and not eat up all of the storage space on Stew's server.  No sense in costing him any more money than necessary to host this pretty valuable forum.

I didn't see any way to do that from the gallery pages though.  It looks like the forum software only allows pictures uploaded to be part of a gallery.

If you don't have any other place to put the photos, I'm not saying don't use the site, but if you've another place to put them, it might be better on both the bandwidth and storage quotas wherever cr0 is physically hosted.  If every one of the 4089 members uploaded a single 100k photo (the ones in my posts were between 50-100k each), that'd be around 400MB of storage.  Of course, that isn't the case (there's only a handful of pictures that I've seen in the galleries), but if you add the software and other downloads, etc., it all adds up.

If none of the above makes any sense to you, then don't worry about it.   Wait 'till Stew's sorted more storage and bring on the photos.

Just trying to help out...