Just did this. All went well, I ended up with 4 portions of paste and 4 portions of sauce, each one for one standard portion of base sauce and about 500g chicken tikka.

I can't say I'm keen on this type of curry though. I'm more into Bhoona, Rogan Josh, etc, and this is very much like Korma. Korma's sause is essentially base sauce with some cream added, while the sweetness in CTM comes from almond powder and sugar. For me these aren't really curry's.

Anyway, it's OK if you prefer sweet curry. Won't be a permanent fixture on my shortlist.

Was brought up on restaurant curry with 3 chapati's, no cutlery, no rice, no naan. Maybe I'm biased then, but you just can't beat a curry with fresh chapati. That said, most restaurants have no idea how to make chapati, it's often not even on the menu, so it's normally naan when eating out these days.

In recent times I've cracked both chapati's (rack, direct over heat) and naan (happy chris's). Chapati's are certainly a lot easier and just as enjoyable as naan, but it's nice to mix and match.

I don't feel too old myself, but it proudly states outside that it opened in 1986, and I've been going there since that time, but not frequently enough that they ever got to know me. It was never a posh place, more like a cafe, 'pee from a distance' when you go to the loo type of thing. The food was to die for though, best ever. In the last few years they upgraded from cafe style and attempted the restaurant look, the son took over from the ageing chef. Being more one for a takeaway, I didn't go into the new restaurant part until recently. In some ways I'm quite upset that it marks the end of an era for me, because, after all these years, it's sure I'll never go back again. Maybe I got snobby or they just failed to move along with the times, but the experience was shocking.

To offer just an idea... imagine walking in, not long after opening, and seeing all the knives and forks laid out. You notice that the napkins are not neatly folded around them, but seem strangely squashed around them. So you look closer and see that the cutlery itself is dirty, as in used! You persuade yourself that it must be a table someone just left, so look for a clean table. But all the tables have used knives and forks laid out! At that point you can't quite bring yourself to believe this is quite right, surely there must be some other explanation, but no, when pointed out, the waiter (son) goes and changes our cutlery, but none of the rest, just ours. Before their restaurant upgrade they didn't offer cutlery, you ate with chapattis. Perhaps they should have stuck with that.

Believe me when I say I'll talk about this experience for years. The food has to be outstanding to cope with such things, and it no longer is, so never again.

Over a decade ago when I lived in Darlington, my favourite restaurant, Star of Bengal, had a great base sauce. They had won some awards. It was early days for me, I still didn't know about base sauce, but in a tour of their kitchen I did see carrots (what??), cabbage (what??) and a big pan of golden sauce on the hob. What I was absolutely sure of was that they had Chinese 5 spice somewhere in the ingredients. I'm now fairly convinced this was part of their base sauce spice mix. I did try and replicate it at the time with my "from scratch" curry cook approach, but I think a retry with the base sauce method is called for.

Has anyone tried chinese 5 spice in a base and had good results? I'm a little unsure about proportions.

I really think there is something in what fried said. For one thing, it is certain that when the head chef is not there, the stand-in chef certainly uses the same recipe, but the flavour difference is obvious. I've experienced this many times in many different favourite restaurants through the years. Much of the final flavour is clearly in the method.

Also, on a personal level, I switched to the BIR base sauce approach about a year ago, and in that time I have found greater flavour improvement from changing the method as opposed to changing the ingredients. In short on that point, improvements came from frying garlic & ginger in both the base and final curry, frying all spices (other than garam masala), cooking the final curry hot and quick and to the right consistency. That last point took me a while to get right; no book can teach me that, only experience.

Another big leap towards BIR came from the right use of whole spices at the right time, such as brown cardomom in saag and star anise in jalfrezi. Small things, big difference.