I suspect the main reason is factors 2 & 3.

Yes I agree with you there. When you cook your nose is bombarded with aroma particles and soon becomes used to them so you no longer can smell them. So walking into a kitchen to be hit by all the aromas is quite a different experience to cooking yourself. Bruce Edwards talks about this in his Curry House Cookery. I've had a similar experience when my brother cooks curry. I think often they can taste better than mine. But he says the same of my curries!

I really do think the psychological factor is significant. I'm going off on a tangent from the original post but this interests me a lot! I mean let's compare the two briefly:

Cook at home:
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Requires effort (even though we all love it), nose bombarded with cooking smells, can be a little stressful (prep, remembering recipes, washing up, cleaning, mess), there is a chance it might not turn out well (happens to all of us at some point) which itself can induce a little stress, you know that YOU have cooked it, there is less anticipation since you make it yourself, you have to serve yourself etc etc

Restuarant / T/A:
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more sense of excitement / anticipation, choosing what to order gets your imagination going and tastebuds tingling, you get that aroma hit when you first smell the curry, no stress with cleaning / washing up/ cooking, it's a 'real' BIR curry, etc.

So even if the curry you made was 100% identical to the take away one, you can be pretty sure the t/a one will taste better to you.

Back on topic, another thing I find with base sauce with more spices/powders in them is that it is easier to hit that spice saturation point when you cook the curry. I'm sure this has happened to most of you when you add too much spice powder and you end up being able to feel the spices in your mouth. It almost tastes powdery, like you can feel too much powder on your tongue when you eat the curry.

I think the less spice powder in the base, the more you can add during the balti cooking phase (before hitting the spice threshold mentioned above) where you directly fry the spices in oil. We all know that frying spices in oil extracts more flavour than boiling them (which is what happens in most base recipes) so logically you would think it would be better to add more during the frying stage than boiling stage. At least that's how it seems to me. Again, I could be wrong.

Hi,

It's funny, these cost ?1 at my local Poundland too!

I bought one of these a good few months ago for exactly the same reason as you. I buy the 5lb bags of onions too and bought this to put the 'left over' onions into.

As well as keeping them as fresh as possible, not being full of holes like the onion nets means the bits of skin that fall off don't end up everywhere in the cupboard either.

I think our Poundland has balti dishes too, but I've not bought one since they seem a little flimsy, but that's to be expected for ?1

Thanks for the recipe links, will check them out.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not knocking gravy curries for the sake of it, in fact I'm not knocking good ones at all, but once I tasted a real Handi, the difference was unmissable.

I've also seen some restaurants label certain curries on their specials menu as 'Handi' or 'Clay Pot Chicken' for example, but in fact they don't cook them from scratch in real clay pots. So if people try these they may think they are no better than regular gravy curries since they probably use the same gravy.

ELW - I reckon you should go for it and try a dish from one of your local 'Authentic Indian' restaurants, and quiz them about the cooking process etc.

I was wondering if anyone else on here had moved towards preferring real Handi type curries over gravy ones?

That said, I feel like making some curry gravy tonight since I haven't made some for ages now!

Hi, nice to see a curry made from scratch. Made well, these taste better than gravy based curries.

Luckily I have an asian friend who gave me a few lessons in 'home style' curry cooking.

When starting to cook a curry like this, I always throw in some whole garam masala, which can be any whole spices you like. I personally love black cardamons so I add 3 or 4 of these, a bay leaf, a couple of cloves and a piece of cassia bark. I sometimes add a star anise too, which adds a lovely flavour.

I normally try to fish them out of the curry before the end of cooking, since biting down on them isn't the most pleasant experience (especially green caradmons!) but sometimes it can be hard to spot them!

chilli chopper,

picture is immense - well done.

the video is real good learning opportunity for everyone.

the 1st thing that struck me is that i add garlic/ginger paste to the oil (1 tsp, i use ashoka recipe http://www.curry-recipes.co.uk/curry/index.php?topic=3189.msg28438#msg28438).

the other main thing jumping out is that i add the base a chef spoon (4 tbsp) at a time - this stops the heat dropping.

as for KD1 i had same experience - in terms of improving this site will do it for you - think of BIR as a jigsaw that you need to tackle a piece at a time and often re visit your steps when you feel the need.

Thanks for everyones comments.

Regarding adding ginger/garlic to the oil to begin with, the reason I didn't is I personally don't like the taste of overcooked garlic (when it starts to brown) and from past experience cooking 'regular' curries, adding garlic for me normally means it is easier to overcook it. That's why I added the onions first so they would release a little moisture to give a little protection to stop me burning the garlic/spices. I think if i did add the garlic first, it probably only fry it for 30 seconds or so then add onions to get a little water in the mix.

That's a good tip about adding the base sauce in increments to keep the heat more constant. I prefer using a wooden spatula for cooking rather than a metal spoon (but I can see teh advantage of using a spoon in this case for quickly adding the spices) so next time I'll add it bit by bit.

Jason