Thanks Haldi, I'll have a go and see how I get on.

I'm interested in growing coriander from seed so I can just grab a handful from the garden when needed.

Is it worth buying packets of coriander seed from a garden centre, or is a handful of whole Dhania from the big bag the Asian grocer sells just as good?

For those who are successfully growing their own coriander, what's the typical time from sowing to having a harvest ready crop? I guess sowing at intervals will be necessary to have a continuous supply.

Any other tips? Shady position or full sunlight? Water often or leave on te dry side?

Very interesting post, thanks for sharing this Prawnsalad. From what I know of Japanese curry, they make a curry roux with flour and curry powder (like Khoan's now deleted Chinese curry paste video) and add it to a watery soup of root vegetables (more potato and carrot than onions). So this might give a clue to the origins of the "BIR flavour" as the frying of spices in hot oil and the mainly onion based base gravy are both absent from the Japanese method.

Interesting choice of holiday venue too. No Spanish beaches for you! I'm a little jealous actually as I've often been intrigued by the "otherworldness" of Japan. I hope to make it there one day.

A good "overtopped" pizza goes down well mid-week. This one was pepperoni, red, green & yellow peppers, onion, jalape

Indeed Mike. The average BIR is pretty dire these days, in my experience at least. It would surely take a special kind of ******** [strong language removed] to not be able to cook a better curry after more than ten years on a BIR forum. But then...

Kerouac, as garp said it's not BIR at all, but I trust that you knew that and were simply using this as a stop-gap method to get something on the table in time. Your receipe isn't clear on how long you fried the onion for prior to moving onto the next stages, but a traditional Indian curry will use a method similar to what you've posted, with the exception that the onion gets patiently fried for a long time until golden and disintegrating. It could well be that you could've yielded a better result with more cooking of that onion, and I would also have suggested more than 1 onion for the three portions you appear to have been trying to cook.  I think your spice levels were quite conservative for three people too, especially if the spoon measures you referred to were level ones.

Anyway, it's all a little bit moot here as it's nothing close to a BIR curry so I hope you find the time to experiment with a base sauce receipe soon and fill your freezer / get in trouble with the other half / stink the house out / etc... In other words, experience all the joys of BIR cooking that the rest of us on this site have become so attached to

Ps.. Take Garp's advice about George. You'll never regret that.

Where a lot of these homebuilt tandoors seem to go wrong is with cracking of the liner material due to thermal expansion and / or moisture ingress while in storage. You might want to consider the expansion moduli of your layers and also how you insulate against liquid water creeping in between uses. Moisture vapour being absorbed during storage is probably unavoidable though, so hopefully it stands up to that.

If you do come up with something which works in the long term and doesn't require a cuddly relationship with the store manager at the local cement works, let us know. I'm sure plenty of us like the idea of a tandoor in the back garden, but I do recall a few have reported problems with their previous homebuilt efforts. Come back in 12 months and tell us if it's still working 

Wonderful effort Tony. Must've been a lot of work.

Hehe, well I do recommend people have a go at sous vide some time, but not for BIR and not on April 1st 

For making tough cuts of meat tender while avoiding over cooking, it's perfect. For pizzas, onion bhajis, etc.. not so much

PS expensive water baths and vacuum sealers are not required to dabble with sous vide. A zip lock or even an open topped plastic food bag can be used (the water displaces the air as the bag is lowered into the water) and a big insulated picnic cooler box (what the americans call a beer cooler) can be used if the water starts at the right temperature and is topped up maybe once an hour with warmer water to maintain the temp. You might already have everything you need to sous vide, right in your house. Details here
http://www.seriouseats.com/2010/04/cook-your-meat-in-a-beer-cooler-the-worlds-best-sous-vide-hack.html

Hi Anne, I think trying to scale up such a small recipe will be fraught with difficulty. Far better to start with a proven bulk recipe. Use the forum search feature with "bulk" in the search box and "search only in titles" ticked. This will show up a few, but all will rely on the use of a separate base, so refer to the base gravy section of the forum for those. Most will use around 3kg onions and make around 15 or 20 portions so you may have to scale up these, but at least you're working with multiples of 2 or 3 rather than 25.