Quote from: meggeth on January 30, 2013, 01:10 PM
Has anybody regularly used any of these without any detrimental effects on your end curry? What are the cost comparisons? Or do you still use cheap veg oil?

A lot depends on how you want to define 'healthier'. As far as curry cooking oils go, they're all about as bad as each other health wise. I generally tend to use Sunflower oil which is a step up from your bog standard generic vegetable oil (for most read Canola, as others have said) in terms of quality but underneath the more expensive nut oils.

In terms of taste I don't think there's any (or I've never detected any) difference between Veg, Sunflower and nut oils.

The healthiest oil to use is Extra Virgin Olive Oil from the first olive pressing but it's not at all suitable for cooking curries in for two reasons: 1/ the low smoke point and 2/ the taste, it's too strongly flavoured for curries.

The healthiest option therefore is undoubtedly, use less oil! But that's almost an anathema to BIR style cooking which needs a lot of oil to carry those spice flavours. There's a very good reason many BIR take-away curries have oil floating in them - they use a lot of oil to cook them in and as moisture/water gets removed from the gravy/sauce the oil separates from it.

So if you're really looking for a healthier option, use less oil (which won't get you the same taste) or eat less curries!

Meggeth

I'm glad I'm not the only one that gives dal a bit of wellie!

Chilli chicken bahar, I've never heard of before. Have you checked the main dishes section of the forum for a recipe? Chilli chicken is a fairly common dish, what's the bahar aspect of it? I'm sure with a bit of ingenuity you could probably reverse engineer it!

Rob

Are your local BIR take-aways particularly bad ones then? 

Just kidding.

But I do think people's experiences will vary somewhat given there's good and bad BIR's out there. All my home cooked dishes would beat the bad ones, none would better the best BIR's I've been to. Somehow the best ones manage an incredibly complex depth of flavour I've never come close to achieving at home. But I put that down to the many layers they add to a dish - I'm just not prepared to put that much work in.

I think Cory's whole suite of dishes, base, mix powder etc are pretty hard to beat and set a very good bench mark for anyone wanting to create these kind of dishes at home.

My own BIR style dishes are based on his base and mix powder modded slightly to my own personal tastes. I generally add more fenugreek and garlic powder and less salt and fenugreek leaves than his recipes.

Phil

I think you have to give tarka dal a good boot up the arse with some fairly robust spicing to get it tasty and spicy. The insipid sloppy watery creations you sometimes get in BIR's will put you off dal.

That could be why you prefer your lentils in dhansak where the other spices in the dish dominate them. Lentils on their own are pretty bland and many of the recipes I've seen for dal aren't heavily spiced enough for me.

Stephen

Can't say I'm a great fan of aubergines! I don't dislike them, but it wouldn't be high up on my list of dishes to make, I tend to stick with spinach.

I agree 100% with experimentation being the key to creating great tasting dishes, which is one of the reasons in my opinion many of us home curry cooks actually produce dishes that may not necessarily be exact clones of our local BIR's but in their own way taste just as good if not better.

I also think it's great fun once you've mastered the main techniques to take common ingredients and start creating unique dishes from them. I made a potato and dal dish yesterday that tasted great but you'd never find on any BIR menu!

Phil

Interesting.

I agree with pilau rice, I can get mine pretty much identical to my locals as well.

I just wondered by asking this question whether a pattern might emerge. It's curious that so far 3 dishes can be cooked at home with no or little difference to the local BIR when none of them use the base sauce many people feel is one of the 'keys'.

I also agree that 'Chicken Madras' is pretty much my standard dish too, but sometimes I vary it and turn it into a dhansak with some dal (I love lentils) which strangely moves it closer to the BIR flavour I'm after.

Stephen

Any thoughts as to why? Any common denominator between the three dishes?

Which BIR style dish have you cooked at home that comes closest to your local BIRs equivalent?

For me strangely enough it's Saag Bhaji and Tarka Dal. Both of them are either close or equal to my local BIR takeaway in my opinion.

There's no special ingredients in either of them and strangely neither necessarily contain any base sauce, sometimes the Saag one does if I have any to hand, but frequently it doesn't. And oddly they both start with fried onions, or at least the Dal contains fried onions as part of its tempering and most of my chicken BIR main dishes do not start with fried onions. Which got me thinking.

What are other peoples experiences of dishes they've cooked at home and got really close to their local BIR?

Quote from: Whandsy on January 20, 2013, 04:45 PM
Even the oil on the brown paper bhaji bags have the aroma

Well they will do. Oil is an extremely good flavour carrier in fact with regards to BIR cooking, it's the main flavour carrier. Onion bhajis are made up of mixed spices. Onions + spices fried in oil saturates the oil with those spices which then gives you the smell when soaked into a paper bag.

Quote from: Secret Santa on January 20, 2013, 04:56 PM
Haldi always said the only secret is in the oil.

There is no secret. Spiced oil, reused oil, reclaimed oil simply add another layer of flavour density to the dish. It doesn't give you that missing secret ingredient as far as I'm concerned. That comes from technique (of cooking the spices) and high flame burners/fast cooking. I've not read anything here nor elsewhere that makes me think any differently.

Don't underestimate the importance of high flame burners. Commercial burners can reach much higher temperatures much more quickly than any domestic ones can. When you add any cold ingredient such as meat, tomato puree and water, ginger/garlic paste etc, it stops the cooking process by immediately lowering the temperature in the pan. You then have a time frame before the cooking continues by rising back to the necessary temperature. High flame burners will raise that temperature much faster than a domestic one can and in some instances there will be no halt in the cooking process. It's not about the highest temperature the heat will go to, but about no or very small halt in the cooking process due to the fast rising of the temperature.

There's a very simple and logically explained reason for why home cooks cannot recreate that exact BIR flavour and aroma at home - we don't operate in a commercial kitchen on commercial burners churning out dishes day in and day out to the scale a commercial BIR does.

Quote from: Phil (Chaa006) on January 31, 2012, 01:34 PM
(e.g., if I buy a Bosch Professional power drill, will I be a better carpenter than if I buy one costing 1/5th as much from Lidl ?).  Serious question, and definitely not intended to offend my good friend SP.

No, but your Bosch power drill will almost certainly last a lifetime (mines on about 30 years old and still going strong) whereas your cheapo Lidl rubbish will last 5 seconds if you're lucky along with most other mechanical rubbish made in this country.

But I agree with regards to the 'chef's spoon', 'curry spoon' or whatever you want to call it. I have one, a good one, no rubber handle, it came as part of a set, and I use it for dishing up, nothing else - I don't use it for cooking with. Like you, I use flat wooden spatulas for cooking with, because that's what I've always used and they're perfectly adequate for the job at hand.

Like you, I don't understand the infatuation with these spoons over and above the desire to completely emulate a typical BIR chef, without actually thinking or understanding why they use them.