Hello All,

I have just made the "Restaurant Style" base sauce from Mridula Baljekars "Real Balti Cookbook" and a recipe for Chicken with Potatoes which is one of about 12 recipes she gives for restaurant style curries.

Here is the base sauce:-

Makes 1.2 litres (2 Pints)

Ingredients:-

450 g ( 1 lb )Onions, rough chopped
40 g ( 1 1/2 ozs ) Garlic Cloves, peeled
40 g? ( 1 1/2 ozs ) Fresh Ginger, chopped
2 tsp Coriander Seeds
1 tsp Ground Turmeric
1 1/2 tsp Salt
425 g ( 15 ozs ) Can Tomatoes with the juice
1 TBSP Paprika
2 TBSPS Methi Leaves
1 TBSP Sunflower or Corn Oil
600 mls (1 pint ) Water

Method.

Put all ingredients in a large saucepan with the water
Bring to Boil
Reduce heat, cover pan and simmer 35-40 mins
Remove from heat and cool
Blend in a processor

This sauce is very fast to make.
Minimal preparation before hand makes it an easy and relaxing sauce to make.

The base makes a medium brown and quite thick sauce about the consistency of condensed soup. (see pics ).
My only comment would be the taste of Methi seems to dominate and I would next time reduce this a little. However, it didn?t spoil the taste. You live and learn!
It reminded me straight away of one of the the sauces made using the ?100 Best Balti Curry? book and that isn?t surprising as Mridula?s base is a recipe from a Birmingham Chef!

She say?s the Chicken and Potato recipe is fast to make and it is???.very!

From start to finish the recipe took just 15 minutes so was truly a good one for after work provided you have the base to hand and some pre-cooked potatoes.

In the recipe you need ?Royal Jeera? or ?Black Cumin? seeds.
I think this is worth talking about for a minute or two as it doesn't turn up in many recipes that often.

For those not familiar ?Black Cumin? is a thin dark, nearly black ( surprise! ), slightly curved seed about ?? long. It is supposed to be the highest quality Cumin therefore it?s ?Royal? title.
It does have a different look to ordinary Cumin and a different taste which is more intense nutty.
It is not widely available ( near me ) except in some of the larger Asian stores.

Smelling and tasting it makes me wonder if this has something to do with the ?Missing Taste? we all talk about as it is unusual and does have a very ?curry-like? flavour if that's the right description??
I wonder what might happen to the taste of our curries if this seed was substituted for the more usual cumin!??
Maybe worth some experiment and future discussion.

The Chicken and Potato recipe was simple and I used some pre-cooked chicken made from the Balti Kitchen method and the Potato pre-cooked as in the Bruce Edwards method with a teaspoon of? Panch Phoran added to the water. I don?t think either of these methods are necessary in this recipe but I personally like the extra Oooomph and tenderness it adds to Chicken and added taste to the Potato.

The final dish being a ?Balti Dish? is not the same taste as you would expect in a basic restaurant Madras / Vindaloo but for me it was excellent. The taste of the Black Cumin was a little over dominant as was the Methi but I will reduce both these a little next time.
However, taking account of this small gripe the smell, texture and taste were superb.
All elements of the dish made it a memorable meal and one I shall certainly be making again.

For me the base sauce was a good starting point and tasted like it was going to produce a result straight away. It struck me it has a potential and would perhaps interest many of us on this site for a bit of further experimentation.
I will definately try this sauce again and try adapting it with a standard Madras / Vindaloo recipe to see how it fairs.
I have a feeling it will be favourable.

The Base Sauce, Pre-Cooked Chicken and finished dish are shown. Sorry it?s from a phone camera so colours may not be accurate.

If anyone wants the recipe in full let me know and I can type it out.

Regards

Ray

Hi all,

Being a bit of a computer virgin.........well I am at the "heavy petting" stage, I don't know how to add a link to my posting nor insert those "emoticons". Can someone talk me through the process in the simplest terms.

Cheers

Ray

Hi All,

I have just followed the recipe for Darthphal's 99.9% clone Curry Base and completed a Chicken Vindaloo as per instructions (well almost).
Here are my findings:-

The initial preparation of all the ingredients is the most time consuming thing and 15 Onions later my eyes were streaming so much I couldn't see! Next time I will cut them outside!
Once all the ingredients were prepared I was confused as to how much water/liquid to add to the cooking veg and spices at the start as it wasn't made too clear. I know this was a slight oversight and is being rectified meanwhile!

I added enough water to just cover the veg and in this recipe the volume of prepared ingredients is huge and will need a LARGE pot. I actually used a big cast iron wok which took everything.? Once cooking this volume reduces and becomes more manageable.
After the hour's cooking and cooling I blended the sauce which turned out the consistency of a thick condensed soup. I had ended up with about 4 litre's in volume! My first reaction to the taste was, "god that's hot"!!
Knowing Darth like's his curries hot is apparent by the first taste. For me this was quite enough "heat" so I decided not to add any more chillie powder at the next stage which calls for an additional 3 dessertspoons extra hot powder!!! Phew!!

Darth told me the sauce I had made was too thick and I had not added enough water at the start so I rectified this by adding more at this stage. This immediately brought the heat down to a better level for my taste and the sauce was then more the consistency of in Darth's words "cup of soup". I believe Darth gets about double the volume I had got so obviously I had not added enough water.

If anyone has made the bases from Bruce Edwards or Balti Kitchen it should be about the same consistency as this so we must be on the right track from that point of view.
What about the taste?
I am not very good at description's but I thought it was great, reminicent of others I had tasted, particularly Bruce Edwards but with an intensity in taste deeper and richer than Bruce's. More flavours and spices go in to it than many other recipes so I suppose it stands to reason more flavour and taste will come out of it!!
This initial base looked very promising and certainly does the author justice when he rates it highly like he does.

Next on to the actual Chicken Vindaloo recipe.

As I said I am not a fan of extreme heat so I decided not to increase the Chillie content above an extra teaspoon in the final recipe. Perhaps this could be said I am not following this recipe so how can I achieve the same result but I don't think the "heat" aspect would affect the overall flavour too much.

My first reaction to the Curry Recipie was how odd to just "boil" the chicken instead of fry. However, it really does make for tender and moist meat. Perhaps adding some turmeric to the water for added effect or even pre-cooking in some of the base sauce would be an option? However, Darth's method was good enough for me.

Making the finished curry was very simple and straightforward. Fry off some Garlic and Onion, Gather all the spices together, Pre-cook the chicken add a bottle of Passata, add these things in sequence to an amount of the base sauce. Bring to the boil and..............done!

My bowl of powdered spices was fairly substantial as I had used rounded dessertspoons of each. On reflection I think I have made my own error here and should have used level spoons as the resulting taste was strongly spice tasting. Not spicy as in "chilli heat" but just too much spice. The predominant taste was Fenugreek Leaves and I think I had overdone this a little. Perhaps my dessertspoons are a different size from the author's!?
The actual taste was lovely but just too much taste if you can understand that!
Next time I will reduce the quantities of spices and see how that goes.
The final dish, of which I had three whole litres was enough for about 8 curries. It looked the right colour, was of the right consistency and tasted a lot like I expected it would. The only let down for me was the overspicy end taste but I think it was my error.
I shall definatley be making it again as I feel it is a worthy contender as one of the "good one's on the site" but I need to review what I did and compare this with Darth's instruction's to see what I "should" have done!

With all credit to Darth I think he has a good curry base and it's no wonder he puts a high mark of success to it and has followers at his work who rate it.
But it also goes to show whatever recipes we follow and no matter how good the author say's they may be there is always some bozo like me that comes along, jumps in with both feet and cocks it up!!.
Better luck next time eh !

Ray

I have found in a Pat Chapman book called "Vindaloo and other Hot Curries" a modified base sauce from Bruce Edwards. Find it attached below. The book was published in 1993.
It makes about half the quantity Bruce's original recipe makes and has slightly different ingredients and quantities.
It is interesting it uses Mooli or White Radish (something that has been recently mentioned on the site). The other odd ingredient is 1/2 pint of Milk.
I haven't quite worked out if the spicing is the same as the original but it gives equal quantities of each except the Ajwain which is less than in the original. I am not sure what he means by Aromatic Curry Powder but will assume a good quality powder with more of the aromatic spices in it. The book goes on to give recipes using this base. It has Meat/Prawn/Chicken Vindaloo. Phal, Madras, Hot Dhansak, Hot and Sweet Patia. I will try to get some of these typed up and on the site soon.

Ray

Just found this link from a guy on the in2curry site. I am not too sure if we have had this one before so it might not be such a new one after all but worth a look though. Go onto the site and scroll down the page for the recipe at the bottom.

http://www.natco-online.com/acatalog/Recipes.html


Ray