Nice pic - looks good.
I tried to find Chewy's pressure cooker thread using the site search without success. So I just googled it and it found it straight away

https://curry-recipes.co.uk/curry/index.php?topic=5635.0

It looks good - and you say it can be done in an hour if you put the lid on the pressure cooker? That would be a result when you're a bit pushed.  It would also make it possible when we do cookery lessons to make the gravy on the same day as cooking the curries - normally we have to say 'here's one we did earlier.'

Cheers,
Tim

What you say makes sense Sverige - I dislike the acid taste of many of these ready meals but hadn't realized it was to improve shelf life.

Livo commented about the price of almonds vs cashews, and this got me thinking about ingredients costs in general.
If you look at price inflation of raw ingredients as against the prices on our high street curry menus, the last ten years have been shocking: oil, rice, lamb and chicken have risen steeply in price. But restaurants find it very hard to pass this on to their customers, so they have been slashing margins and cutting back on ingredients. This might explain why I find so many t/a curries disappointing now. One chef I know in Woking complained bitterly that there was a list of ingredients that had been banned by the manager, so he had resorted to bringing his own cardamom pods to work.
Our margins are pretty good because we face so little competition here in France. But they were definitely better 3 years ago, not least because we are not shielded here by the fiercely competitive supply market that exists in the UK.
I'd be interested in your thoughts on the cost of ingredients a whether you think that this might have driven down quality in the high street BIR.

Interesting you say that, Livo. Apparently about half the world's almonds are grown in California and the recent droughts there have caused farmers to sell their reserve stocks to make up for successive poor harvests. So the price of almonds is about to go through the roof.
This is a whole separate area of discussion, so I think I'll start another thread.
Cheers,
MacFerret

Sorry, but I don't have a magic bullet for this one. We do exactly as Little Chilie says. You can cook double or even treble portions to speed things up but I don't usually bother because it just leads to mistakes.  I spent weeks trying to create bulk recipes but failed completely - even simple sauces like a korma just didn't come out right.  I know a guy in Thailand who runs a BIR business with a much bigger throughput than ours, and he and his staff cook portion by portion in normal chef's pans.
The only cheat I have is to run two pans at once. With two chefs working side by side we can cook pretty fast, but you have to try to stagger the start of each pan or you get in each other's way.
We also - for very big orders - cook the sauce and protein separately. This speeds things up but it's more about food safety as it avoids food sitting around waiting for the chiller to come free. The results are not 100% as good as cooking it all together, but are quite acceptable.
If anyone has some tips of their own I'm all ears. I have always said that if you could crack this, the Tesco contract alone would be worth millions

I have been told the same thing Noble Ox - a trainee chef gets told to cook a medium chicken curry over and over again until it clicks. When I am trying a place for the first time, I sometimes order that because it's such a standard. I have also been told by more than one chef that they had to train for 2 years before being allowed to cook unsupervised.  Not quite the 10,000 hours they say you need to master a musical instrument, but in the same order of magnitude.
I believe it has something to do with more and more of the task becoming instinctive and unconscious, which brings me back to the point I was trying - possibly not well - to make, which is that more experienced chefs find highly condensed recipes more intuitive and useful than the slavish lists of ingredients and processes that we find in most cookbooks. So there comes a point at which the request "Could you write down the recipe for me?" becomes hard to fulfill.  Maybe a more useful question would be "Can I film you doing this?" which has always worked better for me,

Apologies for the profanity. I was not quite myself - it turns out I was going down with man flu. So now I am a slow learner with a stinking cold

I'm not sure I can unpick who is and who isn't Not Delia, but whoever invented the format, I can only restate that I like the idea of recipes being presented in a shorthand that competent chefs will understand.
It always gets my back up when someone who has just eaten at my table casually says that I might like to email them *the recipe*.  (This has happened in restaurants as well as at home.) They don't stop to think that I have just done a  technical job that took years of hard yards to learn, and they assume that I can  just send them a page of A4 or maybe a Tweet to explain how. [I'm trying really hard not to use rude words like patronising (moderated) here.]
When you get off a bus you don't ask the driver to text you how to drive a Routemaster.  Airline pilots are not asked to scribble down how they do it so someone can have a go at home. I'm not remotely comparing my competency with that of an A380 captain, but the hours that are required to reach his/her competency are not dissimilar.
To be fair, a few people have phrased their request as: Could you teach me to cook this? But no-one has ever asked: How long would I take to learn to cook this? [Two years. Minimum.]
This rant has a conclusion: it is a great pleasure to be in the company of people who know what they are doing and can share recipes in shorthand like this.

That's a really good way of presenting recipes. A big LIKE from me.
Cheers,
Tim

Thanks. It's really useful to have stats like that, particularly when planning a meal for a larger party
As a rule of thumb we reckon on 5 portions per litre of thick gravy (which we then dilute to about 1200ml).
By the way, when doing catering jobs we cook the sauce separately to the meat in advance and a litre of sauce does about 10 buffet portions, which would be 100g of protein; a full t/a portion would use 450ml of sauce and 150g of protein.  We pack rice in 650ml foil tubs, each of which contains 350 cooked rice. This corresponds to 170g of dry rice.
Off now to try on a new anorak
Cheers,
Tim