Pete, I hear you and think you're referring to "the taste" - that special elusive smell and flavour we associate with good BIR food and which seems harder to find these days?

I don't agree this has to come from using bhaji oil in the base and I wouldn't be keen on buying my takeaways from a place which cooked like this. I believe the aroma is the result of well cooked (long / slow cooked) spices and onions and although it may arise in oil which has been used for lots of bhajis, there are other ways to skin the cat, so to speak.

I believe bunjarra is a much undervalued component, increasingly omitted by BIRs as it takes too much manual labour to produce it, but when added to the precooks of the veg and meat, it introduces "the taste" into the final dishes.

Let me say however, I do not have a good bunjarra recipe and don't think the Ashoka one which is on this forum is especially close to what I'm seeking. A very long cook which lets the deep savoury spice flavours leach into the oil and onions seems essential, with Asian bay being a key component.

Welcome. 

Plenty of scope for asking questions, just don't assume the answers are better than what you already know, as there are some dodgy answers given on here at times!   Always good to discuss things however..!

There are a few bulk recipes on here. A good starting point is to use the search facility and search "bulk" with the "search only in topic title" option ticked. That will show up a few threads started by 976bar, who is our resident bulk BIR expert.

Well have a crack at that pre-cooked potatoes recipe I put up a while ago. It's easy as pie to do and then you can have a crack at a nice Bombay aloo to use up some of that base gravy from the fridge. Here's a recipe if you don't already have one: https://curry-recipes.co.uk/curry/index.php?topic=15088.msg132585#msg132585

Quote from: livo on January 19, 2019, 07:58 PM
Another interesting video and I really enjoy his work. However, he is clearly (and openly) not demonstrating his restaurant style CTM or other dishes.  This is another hybrid traditional homestyle dish cooked in a commercial kitchen.  I'm now asking why he showed making the base gravy and then follows up with curries that don't use it.  These dishes he shows may well be very nice but it is not as expected or claimed, ie; not restaurant style.

Some of us called that out right from the start: https://curry-recipes.co.uk/curry/index.php?topic=15068.msg132334#msg132334 - I still see no reason to expect that he's going to share any of his real restaurant recipes with us, he is simply marketing his brand and possibly making these recipes up on the fly, thinking the YouTube viewers will know no better anyway. 

Green G&G paste is probably because he's making it with water added instead of oil. 

Not sure why everyone is arguing about how big his cups are - worry no more, "the truth is out there" in the video.

He added 400g of tomato paste, let's be picky and say 380g because of the amount he left in the can. At a density of around 1.06 grams per ml that's near enough 360 ml of tomato puree in the pan. About 50ml of oil went in at the start,  plus spices which I'm gonna pretend have no volume (let's be sensible about this!) and 10 or 15ml of G&G paste.

That's it. Let's say 425ml of ingredients and the rest of the finished volume has to be the water he added. Allowing for a conservative evaporation factor of 20% (likely higher than that after 10 or 15 mins bubbling away on a commercial range, but let's be conservative) and I'm going to say there was 850ml of total volume (ingredients plus water) at the start of the cook.

Ergo, added water must equal at least 425ml, likely a bit more. Since he says he added two cups and a cup measures 250ml I'm going to say he does know what he's talking about. 

i know it was a question to Les, so hopefully not too shellfish if I answer, but I can see prawns at 15:12.

I guess they need some to hand to cook any orders of prawn curry which come in, and running to the fridge and back doesn't work too well if you already have 4 curries on the go. Guess it depends how long they're out the fridge for..

Having watched a few of his other videos now, I see no reason to think he's sharing any of his restaurant recipes. He's cooking a kind of hybrid to please some of his customers and to promote his brand.

Thanks for posting this up paprika. Very interesting, although I'm not sure it entirely passes my BS filter.  Does he really have loose Garam masala floating around in his huge pots of base gravy, which he needs to treasure hunt out at the end before blending? Must take a while in a large batch!  He didn't even seem sure which he was taking out or leaving in prior to blending, and if it's a recipe he cooks on a daily basis then for sure he wouldn't hesitate.

A very strong flavoured base gravy if you ask me - maybe it is similar to what they're using on the paying punters but I can help wondering whether the temptation to make adjustments to make it "look better" to the YouTube viewers might have arisen as a result of the basic purpose of the upload being a restaurant promo.

I enjoyed the sight of curry on chips with cheese! Hope it makes it onto their menu.

I was pleased to see he emphasises the importance of a thin soup consistency in the finished base. Seems to me this is fundamental to getting a properly cooked finished dish with the right consistency end result.

Thanks for posting up your method Livo, I may give it a crack sometime. I already have a lasagne sauce I'm happy with, which is miles away from what you're using (heavily anglicised, more gravy than tomato based). But I'm sure yours also delivers the goods.

Ever tried slow cooking that meat sauce for 3 or 4 hours to really render the mince and liberate the flavour?