Here's some text from a job advert at caterer.com:

Tandoori Chef ?7.51ph
Rajinda Pradesh is our modern contemporary Indian restaurant located in the unique surroundings of Sherwood Forest. We require an experienced Head Chef and Tandoori Chef to enhance our already highly qualified team. The restaurant has high volume turnover and also provides a busy take away service.

Salary: ?7.51ph ?  Location: Nottinghamshire ?  Date: 16 Mar 2005 16:01:32 ?  Employer type:  ?

For the head chef, they are offering ?21K plus bonus.

A chef on ?7.51ph might well be interested in earning some pocket money for a private demo!

Quote from: adamski on March 25, 2005, 10:12 PM...how could such a thing be kept so secret. A secret so secret only hundreds of chefs all over the country know to the exclusion of everyone else.

Good point, even though the jury is still out for me on whether we actually have a complete list of all the potential ingredients any of these places would ever use in a base sauce.

There are thousands and thousands of Indian restaurants and take-aways in the UK, with perhaps four times as many chefs, plus retired people and many others who have prepared the elusive base sauce. How can anyone keep such a secret amongst that huge group? It's not like the spice for Kentucky Fried Chicken, the sauce for a Big Mac or the precise recipe for Sacher Torte. These recipes are each owned by a single organisation who no doubt carefully control the release of pre-packed mixes to franchisees and others, or bake a cake at only one hotel in Vienna. There is no such agreement in the UK restaurant industry. I'm amazed there is no genuine 'curry secret' book already on the shelves.

My suggestions for things to try would be (in no particular order) monosodium glutumate, fenugreek leaves, and worcestershire sauce. The latter stuff was seen to be used in a huge range of dishes when the sudan 1 list was published. It must be worth a try. L&P say on the bottle that it 'adds instant richness'. Split up a batch of basic sauce and try adding different things to different (small) samples, always comparing it to a commercial 'control' sample. I suggest a commercial sample of base sauce is a pre-requisite for any assessment.

Nobody responded to my question on whether the smell from you house matches the smell from an Indian restaurant when you are cooking base sauce. At other forums, people have suggested the main element of the Indian Restaurant smell is fenugreek. Is it?

One way to establish what's in the base sauce might be to have it tasted by someone with a very keen sense of taste or a skilled (western) chef. Say: 'what's the difference between my sauce and this commercial control sample?'

Regards
George

Quote from: pete on March 24, 2005, 08:42 PM
I have various traditional indian cookery  books.
Madhur and EP Veerasawmy amongst them.
They are very interesting to read, but I don't find the meals anywhere near as tasty as takeaway dishes.
...The two cooking styles are separated by a flavour that we all love on this forum.
That flavour has become my quest.

I agree in large part.  I agree that the two cooking styles are associated with different flavours. I haven't tasted the UK Indian restaurant flavour outside of the UK, for a start, not that I've ever been to Bangladesh (yet). Perhaps one would find the flavour there. But I group together top Indian hotel restaurant food (in India itself), London places like Chutney Mary, and well cooked Madhur Jaffrey dishes as 'fine food'. I rate it much higher/better than typical UK Indian 'curry house' restaurant food.

But I still love the UK Indian restaurant food, hence my interest at this forum.

Quote from: curryqueen on March 24, 2005, 03:59 PMWe were being taught by a chef called John, he was Indian despite the name and a very nice guy!  I think Pete had a different chef and was shown a different gravy to what we were shown.

Many thanks for reporting on your visit. Re. the gravy / base sauce, the one thing I would expect from a restaurant would be consistency. My own taste supports that from place to place, year to year, even decade to decade.

Pray tell me how they could get any consistency if the base sauce in a single restaurant differs from chef to chef, depending on who makes it that day.

Conspiracy theory: John has one 'private' recipe and that's what you were told about. Pete's chef has a different 'private recipe' and that's what he was told about. And the restaurant's own base sauce remains a secret.

How many portions of base sauce do members have as 'control samples' from restaurants? Does the base sauce definitely have the 'special taste' rather than just the final curries normally purchased? I must see if any of my local places will sell me raw base sauce. I need to go to a take-away with an open plan kitchen so I can see that the sauce comes straight out of the pot with nothing else added.

Admin said that if you use the following base sauce for your curries you wont go far wrong: -
https://curry-recipes.co.uk/curry/index.php?topic=3.0

Yet this recipe does not have Fenugreek leaves. I would have thought it was essential to get the ?curry house? taste. Isn't it Fenugreek which is the overwhelming smell eminating from Indian restaurants, down the street, throughout the UK? Do you get the same aroma from your house when preparing curries?

Has anyone tried adding a pinch of monosodium glutumate?

I was surprised to hear that some of the restaurant base sauces are relatively thin. Could the base sauce have been wholly or partly sieved to remove all/most of the over-cooked onions and other stuff? On the other hand, I always though this ?sludge? was what provided most of the thickening.

My hunch is that large-scale cooking volumes would not make a huge difference.

Regards
George

Quote from: Blondie on March 23, 2005, 03:33 PMYou may feel that the chefs are telling you the truth in what they say, but I still KNOW there is a taste in curries from several takeaways in my locality that does not appear in any of the recipes here.

Blondie

You make many good points in your message but I'll just comment on the above sentence. I simply don't know if there are any missing ingredients; it seems likely but we'll have to wait and see.

About two years ago I met an Indian couple who were visiting the UK. We became friends and they visited me at home, where we cooked lunch together, as a sort of cooking lesson, for fun. Now, this was traditional Indian (not Bangladeshi) home cooking - Chicken Korma actually. I never expected it to be like a UK Indian restaurant chicken korma, and it wasn't. But in it's own way, the dish cooked by my friend was delicious. They brought no ingredients and used all mine. I made a note of every stage and, subsequently, she wrote it down as well. The two written versions were virtually the same.

A week later I attempted to repeat the dish. It didn't taste as good! There was a missing taste. Several further repeats brought no improvement until I got confused. Perhaps the original was the same after all.

I put it down to technique. She cooked the onions on a high heat for a start, yet they did not burn. I'm not skilled in frying onions on a high heat, so perhaps I got that stage wrong.

Beyond technique, perhaps the chefs sample the sauce and adjust the seasoning.

Another thought - I wonder if there are any 'trade forums' on the Internet where our chef friends compare notes, like in many professions.

Regards
George

I have just received the prospectus for the course mentioned above. It's a 'year' (September-June presumably) of attendance on Mondays only from 10am - 2pm. It's free for UK and EU students 16-19 years of age, and ?450 for UK and EU students aged 19 or over. All ingredients are supplied, which sounds good. They mention 'traditional food preparation'. My guess is that the course would teach a lot about cooking fine quality food, like if you have a great curry in a hotel, but I wonder if they even touch on curry house techniques.

I'm waiting for the prospectus to arrive by Royal Mail. Pity they couldn't send outline details of course hours and fees by e-mail. They must wonder why there's a sudden surge of interest!

Further to my previous posting, here are details of the training course:

http://www.tvu.ac.uk/courses/Course_details.jsp?course=650

It says one year, part time days. It sounds a doddle, especially if one is after practical knowledge, rather than to pick up a piece of paper with 'NVQ level 2 pass' written on it.

Here's another possible approach. Please see:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/insideout/eastmidlands/series7/curry_chefs.shtml

It seems the UK has a shortage of curry chefs. The article goes on to say "The only large scale training academy is based in London. The Academy of Asian Culinary Arts at Thames Valley University launched the UK's first curry course in 1999."

I assume they teach the 'UK curry' style in order for the course to be of much use. If they taught how to cook 'proper' or 'fine dining' Indian food like served at top hotels in India, then the guidance wouldn't be of much use in many of the 10,000 Indian restaurants in the UK.

Students might welcome some extra income. Stand outside and offer cash to anyone prepared to pass on some knowledge!