Hi Ivan,

Thanks for the feedback, yes it appears AIR Vindaloo is quite different.

I found a restaurant here in Brisbane that does lessons and I had my first one in their kitchen on Saturday morning. Lots of fun and a great experience being with a Punjabi chef of 16 years here in Australia and more back in India.

He uses 6-7 base gravies/pastes to create his dishes from, only using one store bought paste for the Vindaloo. Rather then a big pot of liquid gravy, everything is concentrated down to a thick paste. Even his precooked lamb/beef is done in this way and when added to a dish you get all the flavour of the thick stock/gravy that it was cookin in as well.

Water he said is the enemy and is just added in to the dish when making, it lasts longer as a paste and takes less room in his fridge to store.

His Vindaloo is amazing, we made a Veg Vindaloo and it is a little simpler then the other lesson one that I have posted.

In went the Onion Gravy Paste, some water, 0.25 chef spoon of Vindaloo Paste, pre-cooked veg and done.

The Vindaloo Paste used is Lashan Vindaloo Paste 5kg bucket which is sourced from a local Indian importer who supplies all of the local Indian spice shops. I now know where to go to cut out the middle man!

Cheers,
Mark

Hi Ray,

I do the exact thing you are toying with and it works very well. Besides taking up less room in the freezer, it will unfreeze quicker as well, and I find it actually works better in the cooking of the final dish as well compared with a frozen normal base.

I've had two different Indian Restaurant Chefs out, and both have said for freezing this is the best way, basically to get rid of as much water content as possible.

Obviously if you're going to use all the base in one go then no need to make a paste. If I'm having friends over and doing curries, I'll make the base the normal way and keep my stash in the freezer for when cooking just for the family.

To make the base gravy paste, they used 1.5kgs of onion and approx 500ml water. When blended it is very thick, and when it cools is even thicker. Oil in the pot first and heated for a couple of mins, then onion in and stirred through for a few mins, then in went the water, lid on and cooked for about 30-40 mins stirring occaisionly. When the onions were half way done at this point, in went the ginger and garlic, stirred through and then cooked another few mins. A little water was then added along with the spices and tomatoes, lid back on for another 20-30 mins. Freeze it in 4 tbsp amounts and that works well with about 250ml of water being added in the final dish.

I also do this with a korma base paste and butter base paste as well and it is superb.

When I'm cooking with the base pastes, I actually add water to the paste prior so that I end up with the gravy and then can add that into the dish as if it were prepared in the normal fashion.

Cheers,
Mark

There is a website for the book too when I googled the title...

http://www.thecurrycrunch.com/

Tells a little bit more about the book then the Amazon page

JB, can you check with your chef if it was mustard oil, or mustard seed oil?

Here in Australia we can buy mustard seed oil from the supermarket and is used quite extensively in authentic home style Indian Cooking. I have a bottle in the cupboard that is definately for cooking, it even has a recipes address that you can go to. It is used for a couple of dishes I know such as Aloo Gobi, Aloo Baingan that I have been taught by some friends from Gujarat. It is also used in Tandoori and Tikka marinades as well, as per this post.

There may well be a difference between what is mustard oil and what is mustard seed oil which is causing the confusion.

Have a look at this youtube vid, it doesn't explain a lot about exactly what is and isn't in, but what I did pick up from it is how thin his tikka marinade is, he says it is yogurt based, but it is very very thin compared to many of the yogurt tikka marinade recipes I have tried.

To be honest I can't tell if he just dipped the pieces into the marinade and then put them into the tandoor, you could see the sauce drip off the pieces as he puts them on the skewer. It's not thick and pasty and wouldn't leave that grainy texture either.

He did mention too that they are cooked in 2-3 mins.

Cooking With Mr. Raghani: Chicken Tikka

Hi Jimmy,

I have posted the Vindaloo recipe in the BIR Dishes section under Aussie IR Lesson - Vindaloo I think was the heading.

Only the onion tomato gravy paste is used in it which is the one on the left. A combination of the tomato onion gravy paste and nut paste is used in the Madras recipe, I've posted that as well.

Don't know if it will be what has been 'missing' so to speak as these are very much what I have had here in Australia but seem to be quite different to the BIR recipes.

At first I was very skeptical of the pastes and thought I had wasted a lot of money with the chef, when he started making them. But that changed later that evening when having the dishes, and I've made 8 or by myself with them now and am wondering if I will ever go back to making a big batch of curry base that I used to do. The pastes take up way less room in the freezer and unfreeze much better then any of the base gravies that I have have tried to re-use in the past.

Cheers,
Mark

Here's my first attempt at taking pics during the cooking process, it's not as easy as it sounds and my angle's aren't the best either.

Pic 1 - Oil and Nut Gravy paste are in and being heated and merged together...



Pic 2 - Coconut milk powder has been added and mixed through, now the sultanas, sugar and salt...



Pic 3 - In go the pre-cooked veg after the water was added...



Pic 4 - On with the coriander after the cream was added and then onto the plate...

And a pic of the Tomato Gravy paste.

Note that it does appear a little grainy in texture, I had hoped that this wouldn't be evident in the final curries when made, but it was. This is from the cashew nuts that are used in the recipe.

Depending upon how you like the texture of your curry that may not be an issue. One of our local IR's has a very grainy texture to the nut based curries, the other it is smooth and silky.

My personal preference is smooth and silky so to achieve this, I add 50-100ml of water to the paste and use a stick blender to ensure the texture is how I want. Make sure though that you go through the paste with a fork/spoon and remove any of the whole spices prior to blending.

When I have to make another batch of the pastes I will do this at the end of the process so as to not have to worry about it each time making a curry.



Here's the 3 pastes side by side...

A pic of the Nut Gravy Paste...

Here's a pic of the paste after unfreezing. Have used the pastes from frozen now to make about 8 curries, they handle the freeeze/unfreeze process very well, much better then base gravies seem to in my opinion.