Quote from: ELW on February 11, 2013, 08:12 PM
Again spicey, your using a tiny sample of available information to arrive at that statement.

Nonsense.

Pretty much every single curry I've ever made in my entire lifetime starts out with frying either onions, an onion puree or garlic/ginger paste in hot oil, followed by the spices. And that methodology is followed by thousands of cooks of Indian food in home kitchens as well as restaurants.

To not do so is the exception. That's not to say all dishes follow that route, because they don't, but the vast majority of them do and there's sound and proven reasons for doing so.

That's hardly a small sample.

Quote from: Secret Santa on February 11, 2013, 08:25 PM
But therein probably lies the answer to your question. If the base doesn't give up the oil it's doing some work in the cooking process which is why the ingredients, counterintuitively, do cook out.

And that's probably where we will have to agree to disagree and why I've been somewhat persistent in my questions.

If the oil isn't separating, then there's still water in the sauce as oil will only separate once the water moisture has been cooked off and evaporated. That's precisely why the oil separates from the oil/water emulsion created in the pan.

If there's still water in the sauce the spice essential oils, garlic/ginger etc will not be fried by the oil and the oil will not carry all their flavours. Oil is the primary flavour carrier here.

So this seems a flawed methodology to me and precisely why g/g, tomato paste and spices are fried till the oil separates in conventional BIR curries.

Quote from: ELW on February 11, 2013, 07:36 PM
BB's slightly less...here's what i posted earlier

It has about a third more.

7kg onions / 600g = 11.6. 2L oil / 11.6 = 172ml.

Quote from: ELW on February 11, 2013, 07:36 PM
600gm onion + 125ml oil- if i wanted to make 5kg version ..how much oil should i use? ...1ltre ?

Slightly more.

5kg / 600g = 8.33. 125ml x 8.33 = 1041ml

Quote from: Secret Santa on February 11, 2013, 07:52 PM
There's no point in harping on about it, it works and that's what ultimately matters...doesn't it?

I'm not really saying it doesn't work. I'm saying, I don't understand why it works.

Quote from: Secret Santa on February 11, 2013, 07:52 PM
You really need to try it (or Taz's which is a very similar method).

I've tried the Taz method a long time ago and I agree it produces good results, but I still didn't like the amount of oil it produced. There's a major difference between how the two techniques work though, the Taz method uses a lot of reduction to fry the spices, to the point the oil separates from the sauce.

I saw very little reduction going on in this glasgow base (for the simple reason that far less was used to begin with) which is the basis for my comments as to how the g/g, tomato and spices were cooked and fried. I saw no separation of the oil from the base sauce. With the Taz method you get pools of oil, this is what the spices fry in, I saw none in this one.

How does the g/g, tomato paste/spices etc fry in oil if so little of it is separating from the sauce?

Quote from: BIR-TY on February 11, 2013, 07:20 PMSo the point youre making is what? You dont understand it because it isnt the way you do it? or because of youre incorrect point about the oil?

I was being sarcastic because you didn't understand my comment.

I fully understand the Taz method but (and I'll say it again) I don't like the amount of oil it uses (in the base) and the amount of oil it produces (in the final dish) due to the amount of reduction you need to do to fry the spices correctly.

I can produce equally good results using less oil by different methods. That's not the same as not understanding the Taz method, nor is it making an incorrect point about the oil.

If you like the Taz method because for you it produces good results, great! I don't like it for health reasons - we're all different.

Quote from: Martinwhynot on February 11, 2013, 06:55 PM
If I'm right I would have thought the idea of having garlic and tomato in a base then adding more in the curry pan would have been seen in your 30 years of curry cooking, from my limited experience of 25 years I've not seen much else.

No-one's questioning whether base sauces contain garlic and ginger or tomato paste and no-ones questioning that finished dishes can't contain those same two ingredients either. It is as you rightly point out, pretty standard for most BIR's for both those two things to contain those two same ingredients.

However, your base sauce is not standard, neither is the way you cook your final dish. However, your base sauce contains the same ingredients (in varying quantities) as most other base sauces. Onions, water, oil, garlic, ginger, tomato paste, whole spices cooked down and blended.

But the way you cook your final dish is quite different to the standard way a final dish would be cooked using a base sauce. You don't fry your garlic/ginger paste or your tomato paste in the same way as at the beginning of more conventional dishes, you merely drop it in the middle of cooking. The question is why? What effect is it having and why are you doing it differently?

Quote from: Martinwhynot on February 11, 2013, 06:55 PM
Your suggestion that the second addition is not going to cook is, to my mind, incorrect.  It does cook out and it does fry; it just happens to have other things there with it - to fry only needs heat and oil; just because it has other things doesn't mean that it won't fry IMHO.

Then you and I have quite different definitions of the term 'fry' and what affect that cooking method will have on the ingredients you're using.

Quote from: BIR-TY on February 11, 2013, 06:24 PM
it seems to me that you both dont understand the Taz base

Yes, we don't understand the Taz base.  :

Quote from: Phil [Chaa006] on February 11, 2013, 06:10 PM
what is you basis for arguing that this cannot be achieved if they are introduced half-way through the cooking process ?

I'm not arguing it can't be achieved. I'm asking what effect it's having on the flavour of the dish by simply dropping it into the sauce midway through cooking and not being fried like it normally is at the beginning.

When you fry tomato paste in oil you caramelise sugars adding a sweet toffee flavour as well as colouring. What effect is dropping tomato paste into the middle of a sauce that is then only cooked for about 5 mins? As far as I can tell - only colouring.

Quote from: Martinwhynot on February 11, 2013, 06:24 PM
At no point did I put para 3 stuff in twice!

Your dish contains it twice.

You added it (I presume you added it, it is in the recipe) in the curry sauce (1/2 chef's spoon garlic/ginger paste, 1 chef spoon tomato puree) and you're adding both those ingredients again in the assembled dish. Yet you're not frying them at the beginning, simply dropping them into the middle of the dish, but the sauce already contains both those ingredients already in it.

So now you've put two lots of the same thing in your dish, one lot originally in the sauce, and another lot in your final dish. The second lot not being fried, so why are you adding them again?

Quote from: Martinwhynot on February 11, 2013, 05:57 PM
Despite your sarcasm, I can only presume that you have limited experience as a curry chef

What sarcasm? I'm simply asking questions you keep answering with the statement, there's more than one way and method to cook a curry. I know there is, which is why I'm trying to understand what you're doing and why you're doing it. Of which you don't appear to be able to answer.

And yes, I have about 30 years limited experience of cooking curries.