what i meant was , why is it considered unfit? i will google it ? who is this google chap anyway ?  ;D    

i always fry my jiggery pokery for 2 mins until gently browning !  ;D

whats the issue with mustard oil, its sold every where in brighton , i broght some. still not used it yet though.

Hi Mikka,  i normally use 1 tsp or less of rock salt per curry. has to be rock salt ! although i doubt this is as much as real bir use. i have seen them use a lot more, and almost a half chef spoon of spice mix ! they dont faff around with just a tsp of spice mix like many of us do

Hi secret Santa, i know not everyone adds lemon to madras, but i know 2 bir chefs that do. When you get the lemon and tomato puree right, its spot on. the lemon must be barely noticable. just enough to bring out the flavor of the tomato and give a slight sweet and sour effect. the sweet obviously comes from other ingredients. lemon and lime is an important bir ingredient, not to be discarded. in my humble opinion ! anyway enough of my preaching !

Jerry, i hear what you are saying about the missing ingredient. I have tasted good bir madras that i swear are made from all the usual ingredients. they have more mastery of the ingredients though. the top notch bengal curry houses do get a taste which i cant fadom out. there could be the odd 1 or 2 missing ingredients with those.

Hi Jerry, yes i suppose the long cook after blending must help to reduce its soupy taste. I must admit i am moving away from using carrot , sweet peppers, and i dropped potato from the get go! Although i did make some great dansaks and baltis using the safron base. I will always knock up the odd batch now and again. Its has to rank as the best base for beginners and all purpose curry making. but i am convinced its main flaw is with madras. as i have already preached yesterday !!

HI CA, what i mean is that a real bir recipe (base + a madras to go with it) must have been gradually developed over many years (possibly handed down through generations) this is why they are commercially viable, and taste much better than home cooked curry. I feel many recipies on this site are not as developed in comparison to this benchmark. I am not saying they are not good recipes, as they are very enjoyable. The chef at my local even clearly stated that you need to make tiny changes to recipies to improve it step by step, over many years. After many years it will develop in taste. Even an 8th of a tsp of tumeric can change a recipe final taste. For me thats part of the missing stages i am working on. I am trying to get to know all the key ingredients (spices, tomato, fesh coriander, garlic paste, tom puree etc) tiny chnages too the amounts of any one of these can make significant differences to the final curry. Its hard to give examples, as its best explained by just doing it yourself.  I found that my madras was tasting strange when i added lemon. It turns out a year later that this was due partly to the safron base, and the tumeric in the spice mix. now i have a new base i am testing, and make a new spice mix, and the issue no longer occurs. for me it was a breakthrough. finally i got rid of a taste that had bugged me all year. its still not perfect, but much better. my new recipe still has some issues, but it will be fun working out how to fix them.

The real bir base i tried was much better at allowing the spices to "come through". it was thinner, with less of a soupy taste. much more like a thin broth than a soup. to me the safron is almost like a soup.

for me i would say all curries work very well with safron, accept madras. which is why i recently ended my 2 year relationship with the safron base ! the safron has too much flavor from the veg to allow the subtle toffe taste of madras (and the minimal spicing of madras) to show up. Madras needs a different style of base, closer to the old kd base. although that base has way too much ginger. but otherwise its not bad at all.