search ebay for "50 best indian curries", is anj impressive book. lovely pics as well. some fab traditional recipies in here. its taught me a few new tricks

"They weren't horrible though"   ummm, i was kind of expecting that kind of response from a pat book. cheers Haldi, that saves me trawling through the recipies, and getting disapointed with the outcomes. instead i will try one of the new dansak recipies from this site. the one including pineapple juice looks interesting. I agree with Jerry that the garam masalla is good. i use that sometimes in my traditional indian recipies. beats the shop brought stuff.

i have had this book for years, and never used it. is it worth the effort to make all the balti masalla pastes? i suspect its not, but thought someone might have tried the book, and could let me know. cheers dd

if you like madras to be quite sweet and sour and light tasting, avoid methi.

i totally agree secret santa. if i ever stumbled across that missing flavor, i would recognise it instantly. the acid test for me is this: taste the curry the next day cold. a real bir curry tastes amazing the next day cold. mine taste very very nice, but not quite the same. some of my curries have that essence of taste in the oily bits the next day. i am trying to work out how to increase this element. i must be getting very near. but still a little work to do yet. when i find how to get that taste i will shout eureka! sorry if this is off topic! 

methi in madras? definatly a no no in my book. its more for rogan josh etc. obviously its a personal taste thing though. adding at the start with onion, or during later stage with base,  works fine for me either way. adding half tsp early with onion gets great results for me (before adding base).

someone should pluck up courage to take in a sample of one of our lightly spiced madras dishes, and ask the bir chef to sample it. then just ask why it does not have that delicious toffee sweet taste which is common to all bir dishes. i cant see any other way to break through the barrier we have reached. if the chef does not know, then it must be a circumstantial thing to do with bulk cooking. I will try to take in a sample to my local ta, if i can be cheeky enough! 

It could be veg ghee. is veg ghee hard, or soft and runny at room temperature? i will cook my next madras in pure veg ghee. maybe the extra heat permitted during frying will do some magic?

Hi panpot, try and discover if they use plain vegetable oil for each dish. or if they pre treat the vegetable oil with some additive we are all unaware of. i have spent quite a bit of time in a bir kitchen and always wondered if the oil they cook in is plain vegetable oil. when i asked them they said it was veg oil. it certainly looked like clean fresh veg oil. however it came from a big tub and not straight from the bottle. i wonder if they treat it with some additive? this would exaplin a lot if they did. might be worth asking if they use any spiced oils, which are quite popular in real indian/bangledesh cuisine. cheers DD

It would be really interesting to know all the details of mass producing curry in a busy bir. For example vindaloo includes a few pre cooked potatoes. these potatoes are pre cooked with spices, in bulk, and then stored in the fridge ready to drop into the vindaloo during dish preperation. There must be lots of other similar bulk preperation happening which we dont know about. for example making chicken tikka in bulk. perhaps the leftover sauces are somehow fed back into the base, or final dish to increase flavor. If anyone has friends who work in bir restaurants, maybe they could get some insider info on this, and report back. I know 2 bir waiters who mentioned the importance of bulk cooking to getting that bir taste. both stated thats why you can't do it at home! not sure i believe that, but hey, its worth pursueing.