Curry Recipes Online
Curry Chat => Lets Talk Curry => Topic started by: livo on February 02, 2019, 11:42 PM
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There are 2 distinct lines of thought on this topic.
I'm a firm believer in the notion that a recipe such as Base Gravy is very easily reproduced with no loss of character in a scaled down version. I think Phil and George are of similar opinion.
I know Pete / Haldi and others are firmly of the opinion that in order to achieve the full benefit, the base gravy must be cooked in a large volume as is done commercially.
I was just reading over the recovered Old Archived posts of Andy2295 and I came across his original recipe for base gravy. A few things strike me as worth looking into particularly from this introductory paragraph. The recipe is here ]http://www.curry-recipes.co.uk/curry/index.php?topic=1476.0] (http://www.curry-recipes.co.uk/curry/index.php?topic=1476.0)
Quote Andy2295.
"As the chefs have an eye for visual measurement using their cooking spoon, we decided to weigh out all of the separate ingredients one evening while we made up a batch of base sauce/gravy. Please do NOT try to half the recipe amounts listed here as the results are not the same. We tried it! By all means proportion out to get a reduced stock but pure halving of ingredients is no good."
Firstly he says they decided to weigh everything out, but then straight out refused to accept multiple lines of questioning regarding a weighed amount of onions. What he has provided are mostly volumetric quantities and as anyone would know when dealing with spherical objects of different sizes and packing arrangement into different sized pots, the actual mass of the combined amount can be widely variable. At least he does stipulate the pot size. CA eventually provides information that it is approximately 4.5 kg.
The main point is his insistence on making the full amount. He says NOT to half it, but then says by all means proportion it out for a reduced amount. This went unquestioned for the whole thread and in the whole 16 pages only George alluded to quantity of scale. (At one point Andy's rebuke was quite abrupt.) I have no idea how halving or quartering the quantity is anything other than proportioning down. (Or dividing by 9 as I would). To do otherwise is an un-proportional adjustment. I see no ingredients listed that would cause any significant problem with direct linear scaling. He goes on later in the thread to answer George's questions about the size of his pots to say that it could be increased into a bigger pot but they do it in the 7.5 litre pots for business model and cold storage reasons. If it would be OK to scale upwards into a bigger pot, why is it not so to scale down into smaller ones? Perhaps scaling upwards would not be linear but he doesn't mention this.
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There was a lot of Andy's input which was either clearly wrong or self-contradictory. He didn't like being questioned. And this notion that if you scale you have to alter the ratio of ingredients is, as I've said elsewhere, pure and utter nonsense. If you find that that is the case when/if you've tried it it's solely down to the fact that you're not cooking both versions in exactly the same way. It's highly illogical to suggest otherwise.
He says NOT to half it, but then says by all means proportion it out for a reduced amount. This went unquestioned for the whole thread and in the whole 16 pages
Are you reading the same thread as I am? On page 2 I think, Pete questions exactly that. And he's rightly getting a lot of stick - but that's history.
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You are correct SS. I completely missed it. ??? Yet Pete / Haldi is now apparently a convert to the bulk cook requirement, or at least he is still very conscious of, and interested in, the possibilities of quantitative variations to end product.
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I cook it up using a commercial 40 ltr pot, on a burner, i use Adey Payne's recipe (youtube)which i like, i then freeze it in rectangular i ltr pots, its a ritual i enjoy doing but at the same time i like to get it done if that makes sense.
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I've started work on a scaled down version of Andy2295's Base Gravy (10 years experience) and there is an immediately noticeable problem.
http://www.curry-recipes.co.uk/curry/index.php?topic=1476.msg12840#msg12840 (http://www.curry-recipes.co.uk/curry/index.php?topic=1476.msg12840#msg12840).
I know he says you can't, but I'm doing exactly half. Instead of using a 7.3 litre stock pot, I'm using a 3.6 litre. The "large" vegetables over in the UK must be tiny because after you've filled the pot with onions, blanched and drained them, they don't fit back into the pot with all of the other chopped vegetable ingredients. I've had to squeeze it all into a 4.5 litre pot and it is brimming. As we are working with volumes in the recipe instructions, it would appear unlikely that this base gravy can be prepared in a single pot. Either that or Andy2295's description of "almost fill the pot" needs a lot of clarification. My pot was loosely packed with quartered onions and not at the top.
Edit: 2 hours later.
I hope this is a good base gravy because it is really a lot of work compared to other more straight forward chop and drop or pressure cooker bases. It's hard to imagine cooking multiple batches of this for a days trading but you never know. I've now prepared the Spice mix and completed cooking Stage 1. It does smell pretty good at this point so it's looking promising.
I wonder what the need is for overnight refrigeration followed by re-heating to perform stage 2. It would take a lot of extra energy, ie: money, to re-heat 7 litres of 2 or 3 'C stew back up to boiling. Does it have something to do with flavour profile development or is it just a timing necessity in the business model?
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I know what you mean by cramming it in lol, i tend to make my gravy thick to freeze and then add water when cooking
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I know what you mean by cramming it in lol, i tend to make my gravy thick to freeze and then add water when cooking
Preecisely what I do too. I freeze 225g base gravy portions and add 225g water before cooking.
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Lol, i get a severe rollocking from the other half if i go "light" with the sauce, and base gets cooked outside, she said "when you cook that up it makes the house smell like an Indian Restaurant" one of the best complements she has ever made.
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Lol, i get a severe rollocking from the other half if i go "light" with the sauce, and base gets cooked outside, she said "when you cook that up it makes the house smell like an Indian Restaurant" one of the best complements she has ever made.
Strange things, these wives; they wouldn't say things like that if they realised just how complimentary it was !
** Phil.
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Very true lol
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Update:
I'm part way through stage 2 of Andy2295's Base Gravy and I will again question the efficiency factor of preparing this sauce daily in a business model. It is a laborious task, however the results appear promising at this stage. I had intended to split the gravy in half but I'd already made the full required quantity of the spice mix so I've just gone ahead and made the full (half) batch.
My previous point about the pot size is again called into question. I started this in a 3.6 litre pot and had to move up to a 4.5 litre to complete Stage 1. I've now had to move it all up into a 7.2 litre pot for the Stage 2 otherwise there would be splatter everywhere,
The stand out of this gravy is how thick it is. Andy2295 makes no reference to thinning it before use but by comparison to other base gravy consistency it looks as though it could use 50 / 50 thinning with water. This will make it very close to the thick curry we eat over here compared to the wet dishes traditionally from BIR. It will also allow freezer space to be better utilized.
Updated update:
Finished! I feel that this Base Gravy has a lot of potential. I will be very interested to see how it goes in a curry and time permitting I may do the next Spice / Chilli scaling test later today using this one instead of Latif's.
Even cooking a half quantity required 4 hours total stove time so to do a 7 litre plus version would be ridiculous for the home cook.
It is possible that the heavy consistency I mentioned is directly caused by the change in ratio of onion to water in the smaller pot. This could be what Andy2295 is referring to in his instruction that Half Quantity will not work. Aside from possibly scaling the spice mix back a bit (or up a bit ;D if necessary) all that really needs to be done is to reduce the onion volume in the first place to just under half so there is more water in the pot to begin with.
I ended up with approximately 3.5 litres, so back to the original starting point pot size but it took 2 larger pots to accomplish the process.
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It does look nice and thick.
A very good curry I used to have was at a local pub on a Sunday evening (only time it was available). The Landlord had a south Asian chef (I think Bangladeshi) that came in and started it on a Friday evening to achieve the finished product by the Sunday. The chef wasn't there all the time and the pubs had limited opening hours back then as well. The aroma on a Saturday evening certainly helped the local TA's do a little more business I think.
And so to my point, commercially it may not have been feasible but since TA's don't open in the UK much before early afternoon, I guess there are several hours for the preparation of the base gravy on a daily basis if that spare time is utilised in prep.
Please keep us informed on how it goes.
BAJ.
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Aside from possibly scaling the spice mix back a bit (if necessary)
If, as you assert, the spice needs reducing when bulking up then surely it needs increasing when reducing down? Or does the magic spice-pixie not work in reverse? ;D
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Thanks for pointing that out SS. Now fixed. I should have written if the spicing needs to be varied. You are correct that it would need to work in reverse. However, there are 2 things to consider here.
Firstly the spice mix used in this gravy doesn't contain any chilli and only a trace amount of cinnamon. The other spice possibly subject to non linear scaling is Cumin. I used a linear reduction of 50% to make a half batch. Applying the X 1.5 rule in reverse here with the quantities involved would be negligible anyway. We are talking here about one instance of halving in a relatively lightly spiced base gravy when compared to a dish preparation involving more concentrated spicing and including chilli.. When applying a non linear factor to increased quantity, one instance of doubling is linear, so one instance of halving at this quantity is consistent in principle. The non linear approach to bulk cooking is used dealing with multiple increases in quantity in comparatively highly spiced actual dishes. Not base gravy.
Secondly, I made the statement about spice levels being scaled back, if necessary, in direct reference to Andy2295's claim that you can't simply halve everything to make a half sized batch. He says it doesn't work and the ingredients need to be proportioned, whatever that means. It could mean scaling up or down. I disagree. As I've said previously, I believe that a Base Gravy, by its low spice nature, by design, is able to be scaled directly in proportion. I have no problem reconciling this with the non linear scaling of spiced actual "dishes". They are 2 completely different operations.
There are no spice pixies. It isn't alchemy or witchcraft. It's all explainable as simply how spices work. How or why is another question. ;D
Edit:
SS, I've just realized that I actually did (accidently and almost completely) increase the spices to the inverse of X 1.5 anyway without and thought or intention of doing so. You see out here 1 TBSP is 20 ml volume and over there it is only 15 ml. Andy2295's recipe for the spice mix is given in mainly 2 TBSP measurements so where he was stipulating 2 TBSP (30 ml by volume), I used 1 TBSP (20 ml), which is exactly the X 1.5 factor in reverse as the reciprocal of 1.5 is 0.66667. The Garam Masala and Cumin halved from 1 TBSP, I measured 2 level tsp. The cinnamon is linear though I'm afraid, but I'm sure the difference between 1/4 tsp and 1/3 tsp won't be critical.
The negative of this is that I haven't actually scaled the Base Gravy by exactly half as I thought I was doing. :( Oh well. I still doubt that it will be making any real difference when you are using spice variations in the magnitude of 0.03 % by volume for the majority of spices, or less.