Blimey, if that's the size of the balti dish, imagine how big the naans must be.?

You could probably have a nice nap underneath one!


Or maybe Desperate Dan has given up cow pies and gone in for Baltis instead? ? (am I showing my age there?)

Hi vin daloo

I'm not even slightly surprised that it doesn't have the 'taste'. I think we've proved here that the taste comes more from reuse of oil, leaving the base to mature for a day and making a new batch before the old one runs out and mixing the two, more than it does from the type of base used. Needless to say these are all things no chef is going to put in a book, not if he still wants customers at his restaurant anyway.

Quote from: pete on November 24, 2005, 08:17 AM
I followed the "cracked it" post by Mark J

Pete, I've been doing this well before MarkJ posted his results, but it didn't produce the smell or taste for me so I never posted on it.

Most recently I made a KD base, made several curries and added the oil scooped off them into my spice oil pot. Each time I made a curry I reused this oil. When I got down to about 1 portions worth of base left I made a Bruce Edwards base using the oil from my spiced oil pot. When cooked, I added this to the portion of KD base I had left. This then became my new base and the oil scooped of this combination my new spiced oil. It smells and tastes nice, but it is nowhere near the overpowering smell I am used to from restaurant curries.

I just don't know where I'm going wrong. It's very frustrating.

I'm seriously beginning to believe that we may be after a different smell and perhaps taste?

Just as an example, if I have a curry from a curry house and leave the plate with some of the oil on it overnight, the next day you just have to have a sniff, not too close to the plate, and the smell immediately hits you. With my curries there is a distinct curry smell doing the same test, but it isn't the same smell, and I have to really get my nose close to the plate to smell it.

hi slimboyfat

You could also have asked about the ground black cardamom and ground green cardamom in the masala recipe. Do they mean seeds or the whole thing? I dunno!

Quote from: pete on November 23, 2005, 10:42 PM
He could easily write another book on ordinairy curry houses

Wouldn't that be nice.?

Maybe next Christmas?

Quote from: pete on November 23, 2005, 09:57 PM
Maybe you prefer to use prefried onions & peppers or old oil, but this is the first genuine curry house book I have seen.

Actually this is what, at least originally, was supposed to differentiate a balti from your run of the mill curry. The original balti idea was that everything was cooked fresh, so no pre-cooked peppers, onions etc. and no re-using of oil. This is definitely the format followed in this book. You'll see that where we would normally use tomato puree for example, he uses chopped fresh tomatoes. There's no pre-fried onions anywhere, it's all finely chopped raw, cooked quickly at the start of the curries.

He tends to use, at most, a couple of TBSP of fresh oil for the curry cooking. This normally gives a different texture to the finished balti style curry, which should retain more of the ingredients texture and not turn out totally smooth like a standard curry.

If you follow the book recipes but want the end result to be more like standard curry house fare, you have to take all of this into account.

It's a good point you make George, but I think in the context in which Pete meant it, he is right. It would have saved me a great deal of experiment and frustration, 20 odd years' worth infact, if this had been the first book I had picked up when embarking on this crazy curry crusade!

I don't know if you have purchased it yet, but I think you'd agree, when we have perused as many curry recipes as most of the regulars here have, you get a feel for which recipes will give good results and which will not.

Hi stephen

I have no doubt that the restaurants still use mustard oil, but probably only in tandoori marinade. Either way, there's no way I'm using it at home.

Quote from: pete on November 23, 2005, 08:12 AM
The methods for pre cooking veg make it worth the money
I have often wondered if there was more to the pre cooking bit, than I knew.

Yes, I agree, it is very useful. What is interesting is that the sauce that the meat is pre-cooked in is used in the curries too and not thrown away. I know many of us here have been doing this anyway, but it's good to see the method in print.

QuoteMace...Maybe that's a missing flavour

It is unusual, but I doubt it's the missing taste. Before I learned the way restaurants cooked, I tried every recipe I could find to try to achieve the taste and smell of bought curries. A lot of those recipes required mace and I never did feel that they were even close to restaurant style. However maybe it in combination with the other whole spices in the base might make the difference. Who's going to be first to actually make a recipe so that we can find out?

Quote from: d14ryl on November 22, 2005, 09:48 PM
does a chef use the same base in a korma as in a vindaloo?

Until today I would have said yes, but I've just got the Kushi balti book which uses a separate base sauce. The same base is used for every other curry though. George, who posts here, claims to have made a passable restaurant style korma with standard base sauce though. I'd refer you to the thread but I can't find it.

Quotei don't really understand why a base is used as i would have thought it just dried up in cooking

Don't really understand what your saying there. The base provides most of the liquid in the curry, it does reduce while your cooking but it doesn't dry up.

Quotecan someone explain to me why four tablespoons would be reserved please

It's meant to be just for pre-cooking the meat, but don't waste it, just pop what's left after you remove the meat back into the base sauce pot, assuming you're not feeding vegetarians that is.


The freezing is suggested at stage three because the spices are added after this and if you loose anything in the freezing process it will be the strength and potency of these. As I've said before I've frozen the finished base and it doesn't seem to lose all that much even after a couple of months.

I think you're right about the methi in the vindaloo. It must have been put in whole, very unusual!