Interesting use of naming. Bombay, now Mumbai is the capitol city of the Indian state of Maharashtra. Financial capitol of India,  Bollywood,  Bombay bottle Masala. Central west coast, mainly Hindu with a minority Christian population. Hardly The Punjab. Punjab is several states away, bordering Pakistan in the area under the mountains and Kashmir. Mainly Sikh.  Maybe it should be called Chandigarh Sweet Centre.

It's an unusual claim for restaurant to make that eating there leaves the customer hungry for more. When I go out to eat that's the last thing I'd expect or want.

Can you expand a bit on that x1.5 per doubling? Is it that if you double, then rather than doubling the chilli you only increase by 1.5? And if doubling again, and again ... then what?

There's an implicit, logical dead-end to that rule. If we continue to increase the size of the cooking pot at some point there will be no need for any spices at all! It's the cooking equivalent of perpetual motion. It's just not logical.

First of all SS, obviously no one is going to increase the size of a pot as to the point of approaching infinity, and at which the functional incremental spice increase would approach zero.

To expand a bit, yes. This is a theorized and often utilized practice pertaining to the increased quantity of spicing in relation to the increased volume of primary ingredients in a dish.  For each doubling of the primary ingredients there is an applied increase of only 1.5 X the amount of certain spices (as listed above) but certainly including chilli.  This may or may not be necessary in the first instance, ie; in going from a single serve to a double serve in the case of BIR style cooking.

So as not to insult anybody's intelligence, I won't do the sums for us.  Obviously there is no need to be FOAM (fixated on accurate measurement) and rounding up or down to an appropriate closest measure would be more than acceptable. This is a fairly general cooking practice and I have in the past found several sources confirming the application of the adjustment method.   It may be related to the lack of need to use extra ingredients when they are not really required (economy) or it may be related to the actual fact of spice overload of linear scaling, or possibly a combination of both.  My reading certainly indicated it the be to prevent over-spicing of dishes.   I've posted some links in relation to this theory in other related threads in the past. I guess I could trawl the internet again to see if I can re-find references to this material.

There are 2 distinct lines of thought on this topic. 

I'm a firm believer in the notion that a recipe such as Base Gravy is very easily reproduced with no loss of character in a scaled down version.  I think Phil and George are of similar opinion.

I know Pete / Haldi and others are firmly of the opinion that in order to achieve the full benefit, the base gravy must be cooked in a large volume as is done commercially.

I was just reading over the recovered Old Archived posts of Andy2295 and I came across his original recipe for base gravy.  A few things strike me as worth looking into particularly from this introductory paragraph. The recipe is here ]http://www.curry-recipes.co.uk/curry/index.php?topic=1476.0]

Quote Andy2295.
"As the chefs have an eye for visual measurement using their cooking spoon, we decided to weigh out all of the separate ingredients one evening while we made up a batch of base sauce/gravy. Please do NOT try to half the recipe amounts listed here as the results are not the same. We tried it! By all means proportion out to get a reduced stock but pure halving of ingredients is no good."


Firstly he says they decided to weigh everything out, but then straight out refused to accept multiple lines of questioning regarding a weighed amount of onions.  What he has provided are mostly volumetric quantities and as anyone would know when dealing with spherical objects of different sizes and packing arrangement into different sized pots, the actual mass of the combined amount can be widely variable.  At least he does stipulate the pot size.  CA eventually provides information that it is approximately 4.5 kg.

The main point is his insistence on making the full amount.  He says NOT to half it, but then says by all means proportion it out for a reduced amount.  This went unquestioned for the whole thread and in the whole 16 pages only George alluded to quantity of scale.  (At one point Andy's rebuke was quite abrupt.)  I have no idea how halving or quartering the quantity is anything other than proportioning down. (Or dividing by 9 as I would).  To do otherwise is an un-proportional adjustment.  I see no ingredients listed that would cause any significant problem with direct linear scaling.  He goes on later in the thread to answer George's questions about the size of his pots to say that it could be increased into a bigger pot but they do it in the 7.5 litre pots for business model and cold storage reasons. If it would be OK to scale upwards into a bigger pot, why is it not so to scale down into smaller ones?  Perhaps scaling upwards would not be linear but he doesn't mention this.

London, I'm at the PC now. The tablet is very awkward to post links from easily. 

I did what I usually do for any new dish and researched / read up all I could find. I found variations on the dish and extrapolated a recipe that took bits and pieces from several of them but mostly it follows the recipe from a book called Made in India Cooked in Britain.  This recipe can be found;
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/foodanddrink/recipes/10922316/Lamb-raan-recipe.html and
https://thehappyfoodie.co.uk/recipes/lamb-raan.
I also used the recipe from The Spruce Eats  https://www.thespruceeats.com/masala-raan-roast-leg-of-lamb-1957562 and
Madhur Jaffrey https://girlinterruptedeating.wordpress.com/2010/05/20/madhur-jaffreys-spiced-yogurt-leg-of-lamb/. 
I also read up on the traditional form of the dish and variations from different regions as well as the recipes for Ran in Tandoor by Ranjit Rai among others. 

Aside from basically following the Made in India recipe, I made adjustments by adding some extra ingredients found in the other recipes. I included 1 onion and a few dried figs in the blended marinade. There were a few spices not in this recipe that appeared in others so I included some Green Chillies (home grown hot little birdseyes), 1 tsp of Garam Masala and a few cloves. I nearly doubled the amount of yogurt and also added a TBSP of Malt Vinegar. I used 2 X 1" pieces of cinnamon stick instead of powder.  You just grind the spices, or use powdered, put all the marinade ingredients in a blender and blitz. Clean up and make deep square cuts in the leg of lamb and marinate it for at least 8 hours. 24 - 48 hours is recommended. 

This can be slow roasted in a home oven, cooked completely in a low Tandoor or, as I intend to do, oven first then finish in the Tandoor.  A 2.5 kg leg is recommended to be cooked over at least 3 hours so I'd say your only using 140'C - 150'C for 2 1/2 hours and finish with a higher temperature for 20 - 30 minutes to brown and crisp the outside up.  Cooked low and slow will provide more tender lamb so you could cook this over a longer time at lower temperature. 4 hours at 120'C or 6 -7 hours at 100'C.

I'll be cooking it later this evening as it's tipped to reach 40 odd 'C in the shade today.  I'm really looking forward to it.  ;D

I was going through my Curry Cupboard this morning to look for different pastes and I came across this.  I don't know how I've missed it so often and it has actually come with us on at least 1 house move (possibly 2).  The original Patak's tin cans have not been available for quite a while but I seem to recall that they did make a good dinner in the day.

Unfortunately it is past it's "best before" date but I only use them as a guide anyway and it's only 5 years.    It shows no sign of rust or deterioration other than on the label so I'm game.  I may purchase some breast fillet this arvo and use this to do a side by side with Latif's CTM tonight.