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.
Topic: You can't cook restaurant curry at home - official (Read 11329 times)
