Quote from: Razor on December 24, 2011, 01:49 PM...and I have replaced my chilli powder with kashmiri mirch, but that is my personal preference.

Seems like you did then!

It's always been my understanding in more traditional Indian cookery that the milder Kashmiri chilli's are used in Rogan Josh, but I wasn't sure if that was carried over into BIR type cookery.

Quote from: Razor on December 24, 2011, 01:10 PM
My recent post on Rogan Josh demonstrates what you mention.

Out of curiosity, did you use Kashmiri chillies in your Rogan Josh?

Quote from: Razor on December 24, 2011, 01:17 PMWell, my understanding of the 'toffee' note is, when the spice hit the oil, a good indication of when they are cooked properly, is an apparent aroma of toffee ascending up the old hooter.

And my understanding of the 'toffee smell' or smokey flavour that I define it as, comes from 'caramelisation' and not the correct cooking of the spices!

Not saying you're wrong at all, just saying my understanding of it is different to yours.

Hence my rather belligerent pursuit of the method of 'caramelising' the base sauce using an uncoated aluminium pan which was the contentious issue in so much of the latter half of this thread.

Caramelisation is the burning of sugars contained in the onions and does produce a 'toffee' type smell, hence my understanding that the smokey flavour comes from this process.

Quote from: Razor on December 24, 2011, 12:49 PMI assume when you say smokey, you don't mean like smokey bacon or smoked haddock, or even smoked paprika?

Ray

It's a hard quality/flavour to define and for many it's that final 5%, it certainly is for me. Cory posted a link to an excellent article on it further back in the thread and it's a good read -

https://curry-recipes.co.uk/curry/index.php?topic=1851.0

Jerry also did some experimentation on it too, but I can't find the link to his thread at the moment.

Quote from: Razor on December 24, 2011, 10:31 AM
My understanding is, he wants to cook the best BIR food that he can, and possibly better his favourite restaurant.  To do that, he needs to understand the science.

Ray

It's not really a question of trying to create the 'best' dishes I can, because 'best' is a relative term. I think it's in any cooks nature to produce the tastiest and most enjoyable dishes with the ingredients they have at hand. In that sense I'm no different to anyone else here, they all want to produce the 'best' they can as well.

What I'm trying to do is define and understand each separate BIR curry cooking technique used to achieve the flavours you generically find in most if not all BIR style restaurant dishes. Once all those techniques are defined and understood, you should then be able to not only cook the variations found in most BIR restaurants, ie Bhuna, Vindaloo, Dopiaza, Madras etc, by varying the ingredients but do so reliably and with repeatable consistent results and not the 'hit and miss' results many people here seem to experience.

Once that's been achieved with reliable consistency, you can then transport those skills and techniques to other ingredients and actually start to create new and different dishes from scratch and without following an established recipe.

The big problem I feel for many people here, is that because they simply do not know or fully understand all the techniques involved they're wedded to established recipes and can't move away from them with any reliability.

I'll give you an example of precisely what I'm talking about. You go with a bunch of mates to a new Curry Restaurant you've never been to before, you have a dish recommended by the chef as a 'Restaurant Special' let's say 'Sindhi Style Lamb'. You recognise familiar flavours and you know the principal ingredients, how are you going to replicate this dish at home without a specific recipe, unless you fully understand all the standard BIR style cooking techniques?

That's what I'm trying to achieve.

Quote from: chriswg on December 24, 2011, 09:03 AM
So after a long and lively thread are there any specific questions that still remain unanswered?

Yes. How do you get the smokey flavour in a BIR style curry on a standard kitchen gas hob and without resorting to high flame burners in the garden.

Quote from: Razor on December 23, 2011, 06:32 PM
Yes you are correct, at the very beginning I did follow CA's methods and recipes, but further into the thread I do indicate that I changed this by creating a spice mix that I believe compliments my base and whilst I did still follow CA's methods, the flavour of the dishes changed somewhat, as you may expect them to.

Ray

Yes you would expect the flavour to change, but the important point is why and did you think to compensate for the lack of curry powder by upping say the turmeric, coriander, cumin by a similar quantity? You could then determine just how much influence those other 'minor' spices were having on the dish? If any? If necessary you can always put them back by frying say a clove, or popping mustard seeds or cinnamon/cassia bark, cardamon in hot oil at the start of the dish?

Can you see now, that by taking out the variable (the curry powder) you now have total influence and control over all the flavours, so much so you can tweak the dish yourself?

It's a shame you didn't go the whole hog and fly solo, trusting on your own skills and techniques you'd learned as I think you would have learnt a huge amount as to where you were personally in comparison to using existing recipes someone else had developed - even someone was accomplished as Cory Ander!  :

What I find so frustrating is, trying to achieve that final 5% by wading through thread after thread of conflicting opinion takes me further away rather than closer to where I want to be.

Quote from: Razor on December 23, 2011, 04:39 PMSounds like a worthwhile experiment and to be honest, I have already done this.

Yes and it's interesting, but you still followed someone else's recipe for producing the final dish. Why didn't you go the whole hog and complete your own dish using your own spice mix and base sauce? From what I could see you followed one of CA's recipes for the final dish.

And reading through your base sauce thread, springs up another of my own 'chestnuts' - the use of commercial curry powders. Again this just harks back to the dogma I was talking about previously and you can see it in that thread. "...I used a commercial curry powder in my spice mix because I saw that's what the BIR T/A used...".

How can you control the spice mix flavours when you're using a commercial curry powder in your spice mix, the ratios of the contents of the curry powder are unknown? I noticed you mentioned because it contained a small quantity of cloves as an example.

Ray, seriously, can you honestly tell me that the tiny amount of cloves in that curry powder you're using is having any influence at all on the overall flavour when used in your base sauce? Isn't it just more dogma - you're using it because you know the BIR's use it and you're emulating them, but you're not quite sure why?

Is it not better to try and understand the flavours being created and recreate them by using the specific spices themselves? This then allows you to understand and control the spicing in your dishes without any unknown variables? This is exactly what 976bar achieved with his Chicken Bhuna recipe by using star anise whilst frying his onions and produced a cracking dish as a result.

This is just my opinion and philosophy, I'm not necessarily saying it's a 'one size fits all' solution, but for me this is the way I prefer to go.

Quote from: Razor on December 23, 2011, 03:47 PMThe more I think about this discussion the more I think that I'm doing myself a bit of a disservice really.

I think you probably are, but there's a very good way of testing yourself if it's something you were interested in doing. And I'm being quite genuine here, I'm not trying to be clever or trying to prove a point. You could even do it on the quiet without telling anyone, just to see where you are and what kind of results you could produce in comparison with a known quantity.

Put all your base sauces, mix powders and recipes to one side and start from a blank piece of paper and work entirely from the techniques and knowledge you've acquired to produce a BIR style curry dish from scratch. Anything goes apart from following a recipe.

Now develop your own base sauce, a marinade and/or pre-cooking method, your own spice 'masala' using ground spices or whole ones dry roasted and ground and cook out the dish tasting as you go and compare that to a recipe based 'known' quantity.

I guarantee you'll learn an awful lot about your cooking in the process. It's just for a bit of fun really, but it'll test your knowledge of the spices/ingredients and cooking techniques.

Quote from: Razor on December 23, 2011, 03:47 PMIt's turned out to be a quite interesting debate, really enjoyed it.

Yes I agree. Discussions that break down preconcieved notions often reveal quite interesting new information, it's just dogma I dislike so much because it's a barrier to providing understanding.

Quote from: JerryM on December 23, 2011, 10:03 AM
2011 has been pizza year for me - essentially outdoor wood burning oven. have had real good time.

Nice to find another Pizza fan. I used to make my own pizzas many years ago, but without a decent heat source, the base is always a bit 'biscuity'. I'm too mean to invest in a wood fired oven, are you getting really good results from it?

Quote from: JerryM on December 23, 2011, 10:03 AM
the 2011 No1 "recipe refinement" - i've now realised is not practical as a specific task - it can only be delivered over time. i've now realised that you need to make a recipe quite a lot and understand the tastes before it can be refined.

Agree 100% on the need to cook out a recipe multiple times before you can really understand it. This has always been my philosophy too and is a bit of an evolutionary process.

Quote from: JerryM on December 23, 2011, 10:03 AM
www.woodovenukforum.forumup.co.uk

Great link. I shall look at the 'smokers' in there with some interest as I've always been interested in food smokers.

As for 2012, for me will be a year of many changes and my cooking may have to go on the 'back burner' as I deal with other things. But when I get the chance I want to test out a few theories I have with regards to BIR flavours and continue with working on my 'generic' curry dish without trying to create a specific Bhuna, Madras, Dopiaza or whatever.