Quote from: pete on January 12, 2005, 09:40 PM
You say four hours but I reckon longer will be even better.

Actually, the onions were cooking for 6 hours all told.

What I've done now is reserve some sauce, and put the remainder on to simmer for another four hours.

I'll report back on any changes I notice.

If I can notice a difference, I'll probably give it even longer!

Quote from: pete on January 12, 2005, 09:07 PM
I reckon these "all round" places will take over

You could well be right.

Each of the types of 'cuisine' mentioned, has been refined to a sort of production line process, and anywhere than can accomodate a group where one person wants a pizza, another a burger, and a couple more (the intelligensia ), a curry, will be bound to thrive.

Quote from: pete on January 12, 2005, 09:40 PM
Hi Muttley!
This sounds good
I really believe that the key to a good sauce is the initial garlic ginger fry (as you said) and the L O N G boil

Well, when I "reverse engineered" the sauce from what I believed the IR's must do, I actually changed the garlic/ginger frying to what you suggested. I would have done it for a couple of minutes until just coloured, but what you said about frying it slowly until it browned, seemed, intuitively right, somehow, so that's what I did.

The other thing I'm still not sure about is whether it would be better to fry the onions first. And if so, for how long.

There are so many permutations and combinations.

The trouble is, that you actually get quite a lot of sauce for each batch you try.

Having mused on this even further, I'm pretty sure that the basic sauce should not contain tomato. I don't think that long cooking of the tomato actually adds anything, and it makes the basic sauce less versatile (cannot really be used with anything that shouldn't end up red-orange in colour.

I think now that I've got something that is as near as damn it spot on, I can use physics to try and simplify/speed up production.

What I'd like to be able to achieve is a technique that anyone can try - one that will not look intimidating and overly time consuming or complicated to those trying to take their frst steps in home cooked curry.

One possibility that I think may well be beneficial is microwaving the onions first. Microwaves are not, generally, that useful in cooking, but one thing they can do is break down the cellular structure of high water content ingredients placed in them. I think this and frying the onions might speed up the process a little.

I doubt, though, that it will ever become a 20min operation (or indeed, a 2 hour one).

Well, I'd add it when you actually use the sauce to make the specific dish.

I've been experimenting with this, and I'm wondering whether one should even add tomatoes to the basic sauce. You can certainly make a creamy sauce by adding the basic sauce, gradually, to some youghurt/cream that is already cooking, but it does end up orange. For curries such as Passanda, Korma and Malay, for example, it would definitely yield a sauce of the wrong colour.

Is there any flavour blending between the tomatoes and the other ingredients that takes longer than a few minutes to achieve? Certainly the next batch of this I make will omit the tomatoes.

I wanted to make the sauce as basic, and hence as versatile as possible. This is why there are no "bells and whistles" included.

Also, please note that whilst the finished sauce looks exactly correct in its saucepan (because all the oil is floating on the surface), when you use it to make a dish, it no longer looks quite like a BIR dish, because I used less oil, and so the finished curry doesn't have the little pools of oil that you get with a resturant curry. Of course, you could simply double the quantity of oil, and then it should be a dead match, but not everyone actually wants that much oil with their food - even if it does improve the eating experience a little.

Quote from: tempest63 on January 12, 2005, 05:29 PM
She says that more and more people are looking for authentic food in pleasant surroundings and the number of people looking for curry house style food is waning. She also points out that the fresh chilled and frozen curries are improving dramatically and more and more people are happy to eat these at home, whereas once you would have had to go to a restaurant or take-away.

An interesting anaysis, but I don't know where she gets her data from. There is a general upsuge in eating out, so, I'm sure there will be more people looking for authentic foods of al types, but I've seen no evidence of a downturn in the standard IR trade - quite the reverse. New ones appear, but I don't ever remember seeing one shut down completely.

QuoteBy the way, does anyone remember the old Vesta boil in a bag curries?
They seem a million years away now.

I remember them, but I'm glad to say I've never actually eaten one (shudder).

That looks superb (although, it could probably do with some more chilli ).

Are you a professional food photographer?

It's generally reckoned to be one of the most difficult branches of photography (photographing wet/hot food), and yet I can almost taste your photo.

Quote from: tempest63 on January 11, 2005, 05:15 PM
The author of the book feels that the Indian restaurant scene as we know it today will probably not be sustained as demand for the high street restaurant curry falls off.

Does she explain why she thinks the demand will fall off. The town where I live has had two IR's open in the last year, but neither have been the more authentic, expensive type? They all seem to do very good business.

And although there may be a few higher grade resturants (generaly) opening, there always seem to be 4 or 5 pizza/burger/chicken places for each qualty place.

That's interesting.

So in a resturant, they'd have a load of cooked chicken etc, and would just need to takes some basic sauce, add any extra vegetables (already cooked), the finishing spices and some chicken, and let the chicken warm through.

It's becoming clearer and clearer how they manage  the almost miraculous range of dishes so quickly from (often) such small kitchens.

A while back I was thinking about the chicken pieces you get in BIR's nowadays (at least down here in the South, it's almost invariably chicken breast), and I realised, that they do not fry the meat at all.

When you get a BIR chicken dish, you can quite clearly see the shape of the chicken as it has been cut from a breast fillet. If you fry one of those, the shape of the piece of meat will change as the fibres tighten, no matter how gently you do it.

I tried this the next time I made a dish with a sauce. Just cut? the chicken into pieces and added them, uncooked, to a very, very gently simmering sauce.

The result was very tender chicken with exactly the texture you get in a BIR. This is one aspect of BIR cooking that I think it is well worth emulating.

Of course, chicken breast is not the best flavoured meat, so it's probably better not to use it exclusively.

This sauce seems to me to be a base from which you can make a large number of BIR style curries. I've only tried to make a Madras so far, and it seemed to me to be indistinguishable from a good takeaway example.

Ingredients

4 Large Onions (or 8 small ones - probably better, but hard to get hold of at the moment)
200ml vegetable Oil
1/2 tsp aesofetida
1/2 tsp chilli
3 tsp Turmeric
3 tsp Ground cumin
1 tbls peeled/chopped garlic
1 tbls peeled/chopped ginger
1 can tomatoes

Method

Heat oil until garlic and ginger just sizzle quietly
Cook garlic and ginger for about 8 mins until almost browned
Add aesofetida, turmeric, cumin and chilli and continue cooking for 2 mins
Add onions, sliced and stir to coat with oil
Add enoughg water to nearly cover the onions
Boil on a gentle simmer for an hour
Add the can of tomatoes
Puree with a hand blender (or in a food processor if you haven't got one)
Cook (covered) on a very gentle simmer for 4 hours. This sauce is sufficiently runny that it will not gloop or stick, so just needs a very occasional stir - in fact, I'm not sure it even needs that.

You should now have a sauce from which you can make a wide variety of BIR style curries.

A version without tomatoes is obviously needed for some sauces.

I've tried Madras, and verified that by gradually adding some sauce to some cooking youghurt/cream, you will get the creamy type of sauce needed for a Passanda/Korma/Malay (although these would need the non-tomatoe version).
Don't try to add youghurt/cream to the sauce, it won't work - it'll taste OK, but the youghurt/cream will never blend completely and will look slightly curdled.

Add some coconut from a block and colouring to a creamy version that to get a tikka massala sauce.