I don't know if this helps or confuses, Ray, but when I make Chinese hot and sour soup using a Knorr cube I only use half a cube in 450 ml of water to make a lighter stock.  I find a whole cube a bit too robust. Might depend on the dish you're making - have a taste of the stock and see what you think? You can always add the other half.

Ian
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Thanks, Abdul. 

I need to get to my spice man to top up a few bits and pieces to make your gravy and 8 spice blend. I'll try this as soon as I can.

Cheers,
Ian
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Hi guys

My Holy Trinity when it comes to ordering curries is Chicken Tikka Vindaloo, Mushroom Pilau and Saag Bhaji. The first time I tasted Saag Bhaji, it was almost enough to convert me to vegetarianism.

I've had some pretty 'meh' versions of it over the years. At its worst it's just tasted like spinach fried in oil with garlic and onions. That, I can recreate. But recently, I had a takeaway and the Saag Bhaji tasted just like it did when I first discovered it in the 80's. We talk about the 'toffee taste' but this was extreme. It was rich and spicy and just gorgeous.

Which is odd, because the main curry which came with the delivery was absolute pants!

I've scoured the site and although there's a recipe for Saag Aloo here (enough to feed a battalion) I wondered if anyone could give me a recipe, or even just hints and tips, for a single-serving plain Saag Bhaji?

Thanks in advance

Ian
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Hi ELW

The Shish Mahal recipe slipped under my radar, so thanks for pointing that out.

You'll love Blade's recipe. I would suggest that you try it first on spec, without any yoghurt, as some people have added. It really works. It works with yoghurt as well, so it's a win-win situation.

I remember Professor Blumenthal cat-scanning his chicken marinated in yoghurt, bless him!

Like you, I want to improve the texture of my tikka rather than the taste, and I'm wondering if it's at all possible without using a Tandoor. I was going to set up another thread exploring the possibilities. I agree laynebritton's looks fab.

I know what you mean about the difference between tikka in a dish on its own and in a curry. It's a puzzler. That's why I like the recipe posted by Pete - it straddles both.

I would still be interested to see if anyone tries/has tried it, and what their opinions were. It's still my 'failsafe' tikka of choice. 

Ian
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Hi 976bar

Just to make it clear, it isn't my recipe, but one shown to Pete by a chef.

I totally hear you on the personal preference thing, and I'm always interested to see how people tweak recipes to suit their own preferences. I'm an inveterate tweaker, myself.  ;D I've added fresh chilli to Pete's recipe in the past with success (for me, but not my chilli-adverse partner).

Cheers mate
Ian
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Hi Mr. M

Yes, I've tried Blade's recipe too, and it's excellent. Do you add yoghurt, as some people have since, or do you do it as he originally posted (without)?

I've tried it both ways. I cooked a batch of chicken legs with Blade's recipe (without yoghurt) and took them to a picnic on my birthday this year. They went down a storm.

Cheers,
Ian
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Hi guys

I've tried many tikka marinades over the years. This is the one I keep coming back to, time and time again. I know that it's all about personal preference and trying to recreate the taste of your own favourite takeaway and so on, but this just does it for me. It's buried right at the bottom of the tikka recipe board, and was posted by Pete back in 2005 when I first joined. I still have the original print-out that I ran off in my 'curry folder'.

It's easy to overlook some of the recipes that were posted here way back when, especially as there's so much info on the site now. This didn't get much of a take-up when it was first posted, and I haven't seen anything since (correct me if I've missed something).

Here's the link: https://curry-recipes.co.uk/curry/index.php?topic=352.0

I'd be interested to find out if anyone's tried it and hasn't posted, or if anyone fancies trying it now and reporting back. If you make tikka/tandoori, you'll have everything you need for it in your cupboards already.

I halve the ingredients and use five or six chicken breasts. I use half a pot of 500g Tesco 'Smart Price' natural low fat yoghurt. The rest of the pot freezes with no problem to use the next time (in a marinade, that is - I wouldn't want to eat it with a spoon!).

The recipe states an 8 hour marinade, which is fine, but I get the best results by giving it 48 hours. I either grill the chicken on skewers or bake it on the highest heat in my oven for 10 mins or so, finishing it off with a blowtorch to dry the surface and char it a bit.

Cheers
Ian
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Hi, Natterjak

Would it be a cop-out to say, 'Both'?

I'm satisfied that I can knock out a good, tasty, authentic BIR-style curry which is better than most of the takeaways I've had locally over the past couple of years, and fairly consistently too. But like others whose posts I've read here during my lurkage, I'm still searching for that final 5% 'wow' factor.

I just don't let it get to me too much! ;D

In case that sounds a bit smuggins, I should point out that the curries around my neck of the woods have taken a real nose dive over the past three or four years, so the competition isn't great! I'm more often disappointed with one I've bought than one I've made. I suppose if I'm chasing anything, it's the memory of the curries I could buy back in the late 90's/early noughties.

I think I made the biggest breakthrough when I relaxed a bit, and started concentrating on just trying to make nice food. I stopped trying to add all sorts of weird and wonderful things to the base, and just worked on pan technique. As long as the usual suspects are in the base I'm happy. I backed off on spice amounts quite a lot, too.

It's worth saying that I've made many curry recipes from CR0 to spec over the years, and all of them would beat the curries I've bought from local takeaways recently hands down. There are probably about two restaurants in my local area left which still have the magic.

I do want to get a bit more adventurous, as I only ever cook Vindaloo and Madras, though. I'd also like to sort out my Tikka texture, as far as possible without a tandoor. That's partly why I've stuck my head above the parapet here again!

Just wondering if I've sussed out the picture uploading process here. If so, here's 'one I made earlier':


Chicken Tikka Vindaloo and pilau rice. 

Yeah, I watched the Baker Boys this morning - I wouldn't bother if I were you. There was a scene about a minute long in the restaurant, then straight into their own fish curry sketch. Which, to be fair, didn't look bad, for what it was.

Thinking about posting here again made me revisit how I got into trying to cook restaurant curries at home. It was about 15 years ago. There was a series of programmes on TV where they challenged good home cooks to go into restaurants and run service using their own recipes for an evening. Does anyone remember that?

One programme was set in an Indian restaurant, and a couple of women went in with their home-style curry recipes and redesigned the menu for the night. They had the regular kitchen staff at their disposal. The main problems were getting the dishes out on time, and the fact that most customers wanted the traditional '8 pints of lager and a vindaloo' experience.

I remember the narrator saying something like: "Indian restaurants use an onion and tomato gravy, from which they can prepare many dishes quickly by adding different spices". That was news to me at the time, so I scuttled off into my kitchen and tried to put together a gravy with onions and tomatoes and then cook a curry from it. I had no idea about purees or blenders or anything like that. Needless to say it was awful.

Then my partner gave me an old clipping from an early 80's Curry Club magazine, which claimed to spill the beans on the restaurant curry secret. It was long before Bruce Edwards, and I've long since lost the clipping, but it basically involved boiling a couple of onions in oil and water for an hour or two, adding some milk and then pounding the contents of the pan to mush using a potato masher. Then you added curry powder and roast chicken pieces and heated it up.

I served it to my partner. She said: "Looks like curry. Smells like curry. Tastes like sh*t". And that was the end of that.

Then a friend recommended Pat Chapman's New Curry Bible, so I worked my way through that for a while. Low points consisted of flushing a finished dish down the loo, and one spectacular row with my partner which started with her saying "Why are they always so claggy and brown?" after I'd slaved away in the kitchen for the umpteenth attempt. But I still use his curry masala mix from time to time.

Undeterred, I discovered the KD1 book, and met with some success, once I started discarding the finished recipes and just used the base gravy with my own tweaking for the individual dishes. And just after that would have been about the time I joined CR0.

Hi ELW

Thanks for the heads-up on The One Show (Tuesday 10th). I watched it this morning on iPlayer - it's still available for a week or so, if anyone else is interested. What a great little film. I seem to remember a similar crisis many years ago, with an appeal for students to come forward to learn BIR cooking due to a shortage of Asian chefs in the country. I can't remember the name of the catering college offering places at the time, but there was an item on Breakfast TV about it. I remember wishing I was a college student, anyway.

Paul Bettany's enthusiasm for Aktar's venison dish in the studio afterwards reduced me to tears of laughter. Nice to hear Aktar say that, of course, it's perfectly possible for anyone to cook Indian Restaurant food given 'Time and passion'. But we know this.

Quote from: ELW on January 12, 2012, 09:59 AM

PS. The Fabulous Baker Brothers ... what next?

'The Fabulous Bhuna Brothers' - I'd watch that! ;D