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Messages - caze

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1
Starters and Side Dishes Chat / Re: Red sauce (Not Pakora sauce)
« on: March 09, 2011, 04:49 PM »
I always use tamarind  paste in the little tubs-it like indian marmite!
I cant be doing with the faff of boiling the blocks.
hope this helps
Phil
yeah, thanks. the paste is more concentrated than the freshly made stuff, just wanted to make sure not to put too much in.

2
First I feel the quick rise yeast makes a big difference. As Jerry noted, the regular dry yeast adds a "yeasty" flavour. The Quick Rise does not.
Did you see my earlier post regarding what exactly constitutes Quick Rise yeast? I'm not certain whether mine does, but I had no problem with the dough rising, and there was certainly no yeast-like taste. What brand do you use?

Quote
In terms of the changes, I now omit the additional baking powder, and add 2 tablespoons of yogourt. I also now omit the water, and just trickle warm milk into the mixer until the consistency is right.
I did leave out the baking powder, will try with yoghurt and milk-only the next time. What kind of consistency are you looking for? Is Axe on the right track with wet dough? I got mine to a very elastic, almost sticky dough.

3
How do you intend cooking them Caze?

I cooked them on a pizza stone in the oven at it's highest temp (it was on for nearly 2 hours before they went in), unfortunately I don't think my oven is quite good enough to get these exactly right, it only goes to 230c.

They turned out a lot better than my previous efforts, but they were still some way off resteraunt quality.

The main improvements were with the softness, but ideally you should have a uniform softness, mine were a bit overcooked and hard on the outside, but quite nicely done inside. I'm sure this was solely down to my oven temperature, I might try switching the grill on once the oven is fully heated the next time (I've a couple of them in the freezer so will try again in a few days). I'd never heard the water-sprinkling trick before, and that definitely helped create some blisters, but as it wasn't hot enough so they didn't brown enough.

The taste was also not quite there, it was close though. This could well have been down to the fact that I used a lot less of the milk-egg mixture in the end, the next time I might use more of that mixture and less of the water.

I was also surprised by the lack of yoghurt, most recipes seem to use it, so that could have effected the taste as well.

4
I've just made the dough for this now, the recipe seemed far too wet for me, not sure why you say to use a cup of milk and then say you'll probably only need half of it. I used less than half of the milk-egg-ghee mixture and the dough was still far too wet, I added enough plain flour to bring it up to almost sticky/very elastic after kneeding for 5-10 mins. It's prooving away now, and the ovens heating up, looking forward to trying it out soon.

5
Your McDougalls Fast Action Yeast is the same thing as quick rise. Principally, it cuts the prove time from roughly half to a third of that of Active Yeast.
This recipe calls for a proving time of 2-3 hours, that seems a little excessive, especially if the quick-rise yeast is supposed to save time there.

When I make pizzas using this yeast it usually takes my 1/2 cup of flour 1st proof half an hour to double in size, then the final dough doubles in size after around an hour.

6
What's the difference between 'quick rise' yeast and regular yeast? As far as I can tell there doesn't seem to be any standardised definitions. There seem to be three main types of bread yeast on the market, fresh yeast (comes in a block, needs to be disolved in warm water), dried yeast (also needs to be disolved in warm water, with something to feed on, like a bit of flour or sugar), and then there seem to be different products (all with different names by the looks of things) which are dried yeast with various addatives that don't need to be proved in water first (is this what you are refferring to?). All I have is 'McDougalls Fast Action Bread Yeast', I'm not sure wether this qualifies as dried yeast, or quick-rise yeast (it contains Ascorbic Acid and Calcium Sulphate, not sure if either of these are rising agents though).

I've never had much luck making Naan's before, going to try this recipe tonight, hopefully I'll have better luck. I have a pizza stone, but my oven only goes up to 230 C (I'm very happy with the pizza's I make, so hopefully it'll do the job).

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Starters and Side Dishes Chat / Re: Red sauce (Not Pakora sauce)
« on: March 03, 2011, 10:20 AM »
what form of tamarind did you use?

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If you try the recipe I would strongly suggest not using over 2 tsp salt if you are using around 800g onions. Mark says go with 1 tablespoon but that would be too much salt when using 800g onions as I did imho. You also need to take into account if any of the masalas you add have salt in them or not.
yeah, I pretty much always disregard salt quantities in recipes. salt should be primarily added to any dish at the end of cooking, after you've had a chance to taste it (you can't take it back out!). I only went with 2 tsp for my last base which had 1kg of onions.

9
Caze, I know what you mean about trying to fry pureed onions - it doesn't seem to work too well. I'll have to find a means of fine chopping the onions without losing my fingertips!
here's how to do it:
How to chop onion
(though the horizontal cut isn't necesarry because an onion is layered horizontally as it is.)

cutting into very thin half-rings will probably work just as well though, when I cook my carameized onions as a side for a steak (I just add a pinch of cumin and salt (maybe chilli powder), no extra sugar needed, then stir-fry at high heat and slowly turn down over about 20 mins), I end up with a jam-like sludge, so I'm sure it would work similar in this recipe.

I just cooked my first curry using a base sauce in over a year, quite pleased with the results, as good as an average takeaway, but not as good as my usual traditional curry or a good quality resteraunt. Next thing is trying to get the mix of the two styles right, the morishness of the takeaway with the added depth of flavour you get when you go the traditional route. Think I'll try this onion paste first next week, I've not tried super-caramelised onions with a curry before and it sounds like a good idea to me.

10
Hi caze (welcome to cr0),

What do you use to finely chop onions? I'm hoping you don't say you use a knife to get onions down to 2mm cubes  ;)

Paul
haha, I do actually! It's easy enough with a bit of practice, and a very sharp chef's knife or chinese cleaver (I use the latter).

You can get a similar result texture-wise if you just blend the raw onions and fry them, but that releases too much water so they won't caramelize when you fry them, so it doesn't taste as nice.

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