Quote from: Axe on March 19, 2013, 11:05 PMSorry to pick up on this late, but I missed a fair part of the debate.

All good comments which I happily agree with.

Of course visual appearance is important, but it's not the over-riding factor for me. It's taste, every time, and smell and aroma is very closely linked to taste, which is one of the reasons when you've been cooking and frying spices, particularly chilli your sense of smell can be over-whelmed by it, which also affects your taste.

I'm afraid I'm one of those annoying people when out in a group, who always wants to steal a spoonful of your curry just to taste I'm not that bothered what it looks like, I just want to taste it. However, if it's got aubergines in it like your dinner tonight, you're pretty safe, because I can't stand them!

It's well worth trying out mixing your own Tandoori Masala, you might be quite surprised at how much better it is over the commercial version. Tikka and Tandoori isn't really one of my things but when I have made them they've come out pretty well with home made masalas and marinating ingredients.

Quote from: commis on March 19, 2013, 08:51 PMIt's been muted for a while that BIR is not as good as it use to be. Could that correlate to the introduction of comercial practices and kit.

It's an interesting thought and subject.

In my own personal opinion, as I've posted elsewhere on the forum, I rather suspect it's down to commercial BIR expediency in terms of streamlining their processes to make it quicker and easier to produce a wide range of dishes from a suite of ingredients that are simple and easy to produce.

It's about minimising inputs and maximising outputs.

Earlier, older style Indian Restaurants seem more of a fusion of traditional methods adapted for a modern commercial kitchen environment producing traditional dishes modified for the British taste. So they hadn't fully left their traditional roots in terms of ingredients, methods and cooking techniques but had started a transformation from traditional to modern methods.

This is purely supposition on my behalf based on my own experience and snippets gleaned from here and there.

I'm currently reading through many of my older traditional Indian cookbooks to try and understand how traditional recipes were constructed and with what ingredients and how these recipes could have been adapted for production in a more modern commercial kitchen environment.

That might give me some clues as to how to recreate these 30-40 year old, old school dishes as I feel I've pretty much gone as far as I want to with regards to modern BIR cooking and dishes. Like a restaurant, all I seem to be doing is creating similar tasting dishes with minimal variation because the base sauce and mix powder is dominating the underlying flavour. They may look different but they don't taste that different!

I want to get back to quite significant taste changes between dishes but without necessarily departing too far from the current modern methods.

And yet again someone expresses an opinion and yet again the opinion is verbally abused.

Only this time, I don't see Phil getting all uppity about it, because this time it doesn't suit him to do so because he agrees it with it.

Good stuff, I've got your number 118!  :

Quote from: Axe on March 19, 2013, 09:59 PM...like my Tandoori Masala but I can not take it out and it's not practical for me to make my own.

I'm pretty sure you could come up with a practical home made one if you were so inclined! I still have a bag of amchoor powder I've been meaning to use up in a tandoori masala

Commercial Tandoori Masala is primarily Paprika, Paprika, Paprika, Paprika, Salt, Sugar and a little bit of the usual suspects, I'm pretty sure a home made one would taste far better.

Quote from: chewytikka on March 19, 2013, 10:19 PMIf you are hungry, you are naturally attracted to exhibit A, because it has a rich and tasty looking
curry on it, with plenty of Chicken Fillet. The fried rice is secondary, but looks good and non greasy with
the right amount of peas and maybe a bit egg and onion.

You are only supposed to be looking at the rice!  :

I wonder which one you'd choose if you wern't hungry.

Quote from: Axe on March 19, 2013, 09:12 PM
Just my opinion of course.

And it's a perfectly valid one and raises some good points, that I agree with.

You can cook perfectly acceptable BIR dishes at home on domestic hobs that taste to a large part as if they have come from a BIR takeaway.

However, depending on how discerning you are with regards to your perception of flavour and taste they can lack that final n% that you get with BIR food. Many have described this as the final component in the BIR jigsaw that home cooked dishes lack and it's this smokey almost unami flavour and taste that they lack.

Some of us have conducted experiments on high output gas burners to try and achieve this final n% smokey flavour and the general concensus is that you can achieve it with a high output gas burner as used in the majority of BIR kitchens. CA and Jerry have documented this in the links I provided earlier.

But I just want to reiterate this point. You don't need high output gas burners to produce perfectly acceptable BIR food, you do if you want to achieve the full range of flavours achieved in BIR restaurants.

It all comes down to how discerning you are and whether you can taste that smokey flavour and how important it is for you to achieve it in your own dishes.

The photograph I included was an example to show just how many gas jets a typical high output gas burner has compared to a conventional domestic gas hob jet. I'm not suggesting that all BIR's use that particular type or at that heat level.

Quote from: Axe on March 19, 2013, 09:32 PM
Not artificially, through naturally available plants etc. I have recently researched colourings though haven't saved any data (didn't seem relevant at the time) I do have this from a site I found

Fair enough, I stand corrected then on the widespread use of natural colourants used in traditional Indian cookery. And I appreciate your research, I was aware of the use of alkanet root interestingly

I still don't agree that we as home cooks should copy the practices of modern BIR's in using artificial colourings though.

Quote from: DalPuri on March 19, 2013, 09:13 PM
I would go for the first one because to me, that looks like it has some flavour running through it rather than coloured grains of plain rice 

Me too, for similar reasons.

Quote from: Phil [Chaa006] on March 19, 2013, 09:39 PM
Indeed it would be.

And I intend to because I'm finding all this extremely tedious now.

Quote from: Phil [Chaa006] on March 19, 2013, 09:30 PM...and this is demonstrably false, as Garabi Army had just reminded you.

How is it false? That's the word of one person.

One person that has said, I cooked a dish that had that BIR aroma.

That's all. Big deal. What's new? Nothing.

I can do that myself, every time I cook an Indian BIR dish.

So what's Chris claiming here then?