Where did my mu's go ?  It showed 10?g, with greek letter mu, in the preview, but on posting they mutated into question marks 

Maybe you could create a new authentic recipe :  "Take 10?g salmonella, 100?g E. coli, 25?g botulism spores, and allow to fester in a warm kitchen for about ten days.  Then, using the left hand only, gently knead these into the chapatti dough.  Serve with 3-day old pilau rice on which aflatoxins have been encouraged to incubate."

Quote from: Vindaloo-crazy on October 05, 2010, 11:40 AM
Guys, guys... we're trying to recreate a genuine takeaway taste and experience... Botulism is our friend...

I have to say, that really is one of the funniest messages I have read for a long long time !  ;D  ;D  ;D

Isn't botulism from garlic a risk only if the garlic is raw ?  Once it has been cooked at 260F or above for a few minutes, the spores will have been destroyed, and they can't recur once the garlic is under a safe layer of oil.  I was assuming that the original question referred to oil in which the ingredients had been cooked, but if that is not the case then I withdraw my earlier comment about "indefinitely" !

Since I never read "use-by" dates, I would keep it indefinitely, in a sealed jar at room temperature.  So long as there is a clear excess of oil over and above any water-based content, the oil will rise to the surface and act as a very effective barrier between the air (which might cause the water-based content to go off) and any water-based content. Even anchovies are normally well protected from going off by the oil in which they are kept, although honesty compels me to admit that I did once get food poisoning from a jar that has been open for well  over a year ...

Ah, what memories this brings back.  First of all, my first and only visit to "Veeraswamy's Indian Restaurant in London's Regent Street", where the turbanned Sikh on the door and the punkha wallah who kept us cool and aerated during the meal did much to add to the ambience.  Sadly all went belly-up when the bill was presented and we read the unforgettable words "For your convenience, a service charge of XX% has been added to the bill; however, please do not let this deter you from leaving a gratuity : may we suggest YY% ?". 

The other memory was inspired by the words "loaned [the tandoor] and his staff to a restaurant in Whitfield Street, London".  I wonder if this was the Agra, where I first tasted tandoori chicken on which I then became completely hooked, returning every weekend to eat yet another portion of this superb and previously unknown dish.  After eating there perhaps a dozen times, my girlfriend Kirsty & I decided to try somewhere else, so went to (I think) somewhere in nearby Tottenham Street.  It was a total disaster.  We were reasonably certain that they had no tandoor and had to send out for the meal, which when it finally arrived was dry, tasteless and a travesty of the real thing.  After that, we went back to the Agra and never went anywhere else again !  Oddly the management in the Agra were not all that helpful, and we regularly had to argue with them to get chapatti with the tandoori chicken rather than the naan they wanted to serve.  I can only assume that this was because our meal would then have needed two chefs rather than one, but since we invariably had mushroom bhaji and pilau rice as well, I can't really see what the problem was.

All this took place during the period 1966--1970.  Happy days !

I use Bassar Curry Masala (Al Noor) instead of red chilli powder in about 2/3 of my main dishes (with no particular rationale as to which); Bassar Curry Masala is unlike any "curry powder" I have ever seen; fiery red, it seems almost like pure ground red chillis, but in fact contains chilli powder, ground  coriander, ground turmeric, mustard oil, ground fenugreek leaves, ground cumin, ground  bay leaves, mustard seeds, ground cardamom, ground cinnamon, ground  black pepper, ground cloves, ground fenugreek and ground nutmeg !

I use only spiced oil, at all stages of the preparation : making the stage-1 and stage-2 sauce, pre-cooking the chicken, and making the final curry.  As Kris Dhillon makes plain, a good curry requires an excess of oil which can then be poured off before the final dish is served; I then continually recycle this oil  through subsequent base sauces, pre-cooked chicken and further curries, augmenting it with new oil (usually groundnut oil, but grapeseed oil if I have any) as and when required.  But I wouldn't use chip oil in a million years !

Yes, 2/3 of her stage-1 sauce.  I've never thought of combining stages 1 & 2, but it's certainly worth a try.  Incidentally, as I now make curries in relatively small quantities (at most two servings, sometimes just one), I no longer use pureed peeled plum tomatoes and simply use a decent-size squeeze from a tube of tomato puree.  For this evening's curry, made using 1/2 free-range chicken, I used half a tube of tomato puree, and that seemed about right -- not intrusive, just pleasantly in the background.

Ever since discovering Kris Dhillon's The Curry Secret I have based all of my curries on her base sauce.  Over time I have come to realise that I can speed up the process by sauteeing the onions, garlic and ginger, and then pureeing straight from the saucepan rather than waiting for the mixture to cool, but just recently -- and rather serendipitously -- I discovered that I could make an extremely good base sauce with no onions at all !  I should explain that my wife is 3/4 Chinese, and so making Chinese chicken stock is a regular event in our home, and when this is destined to be used in (say) won-ton noodle soup, we add leeks and ginger towards the end of the preparation.  Normally these are then thrown away, but on the last occasion I suddenly realised that they effectively formed 2/3 of Khris Dillon's base sauce, so without further ado the leeks and ginger went into the blender together with some of the chicken stock, and were there pureed a la KD.  The results were most impressive : not only was the resulting curry just as good as any previous version, we now had effectively two dishes for the price of one : won-ton noodle soup stock, /and/ a KD-style base sauce.  Of course, this base sauce lacks one of KD's key ingredients -- garlic -- but that can be added later, virtually at any stage during the preparation of the stage-2 sauce or even during the preparation of the final curry, depending on how obvious one wants the flavour of the garlic to be.  Give it a go, and let me know what you think.