Kris Dhillon was my first BIR mentor, and her "Curry Secret" literally changed my life, but as time went by my confidence grew and eventually I started creating my own recipes and evolving my own methodology.  Now, after several years of experimentation,  I decided that it was time to go back to my roots and to re-create a basic Kris Dhillon dish (in this case, Chicken Madras), to see how it compared with my own recent offerings.  The following sequence of photographs illustrates the progression, starting with the basic cooking utensils and ending up at the finished curry.  Any deviations from Kris Dhillon's recipes or methodology are noted at the appropriate photograph.


And the end results ?  Far far better than I had anticipated.  This dish would not have disgraced the Taj of Kent.  My wife also agreed that this was noticeably better than my recent offerings, despite the fact that she had thoroughly enjoyed those when they were served.

Conclusions ?  "Less is more".  This is about as basic a BIR curry as you can get, yet it left nothing to be desired.  I have reserved two pieces of chicken in adequate sauce, and will repeat this dish substituting Bassar Curry Masala for the ground red chillies whilst making no other changes, then compare the two to see which I prefer (and ask my wife the same question).  Thereafter I will continue to make only one change per curry, and to keep a little of the previous best curry to evaluate, by comparison, whether the change is beneficial or retrograde.

** Phil.

Any tips on de-gunging a deep-fat fryer ?  The dishwasher is failing to have any impact, so I have just filled it with boiling water and a biological laundry tablet and will run it for a while at the lowest setting to see if that helps.  If not, does anyone have any better ideas ?

** Phil.

Following my earlier messages regarding a base sauce with no onions (http://www.curry-recipes.co.uk/curry/index.php?topic=5044.msg48464), spiced oil in base sauce (http://www.curry-recipes.co.uk/curry/index.php?topic=5015.msg48460;topicseen#msg48460) and the use of Bassar Curry Masala instead of ground red chillies (http://www.curry-recipes.co.uk/curry/index.php?topic=5021.msg48461;topicseen#msg48461), I thought readers might be interested to see pictures of the results.  Below are the finished dish, and my usual accompaniments : German alkoholfrei beer, Burmese lime pickle and Elephant atta chapati.  I would describe the dish as Chicken Bombay : a mild Madras strength sauce with two hard boiled eggs in addition to the free-range chicken.

After several years of faithfully following Kris Dhillon's method for preparing the base sauce and final curries (albeit doubling both the quantity of sauce per unit of meat and also doubling the quantity of spices in the sauce), I finally felt I understood the basic ideas well enough to try an alternative approach.  The main disadvantage of KD's methods, to my mind, is the long time needed to prepare the sauce, and it was this that I set out to address.  I decided to make just enough curry for a meal for one, so used one onion, one clove of garlic and one index-finger top-joint of ginger.  All were chopped finely, then gently saut?ed in ghee until very soft.  I then added sufficient boiling water to yield my target volume of curry sauce, and simmered gently for about half an hour.  I then transferred the sauce into a pyrex jug and immediately liquidised it using a Bosch hand blender.  It was clear that the sauce would be of the right consistency.  I reserved about a tablespoon of the stage-1 sauce for the first-stage cooking of the chicken, then transferred the remainder of the sauce back to the saucepan, added a little turmeric and paprika (about half a teaspoon of each), added sufficient groundnut oil to ensure that the spices would cook at the right temperature, and then brought the sauce back to a gentle simmer.  I added sufficient tomato pur?e (but no liquidised peeled plum tomatoes) to achieve the right colour and flavour, then gently cooked the stage-2 sauce for a further 20 minutes.  While the sauce was gently simmering I prepared the chicken as per KD, and basically followed KD's method for preparing the final chicken madras but with double the volume of sauce and double the quantity of spices per unit of sauce.  All was ready within two hours of starting, and was (as far as I was concerned) virtually identical to the flavour that had previously taken 24 hours to achieve (it was certainly not inferior to the 24-hour version in any way). 

So, if you want to achieve a KD-style curry in considerably less time than her method would normally take, you might like to try the method above.  Let me know if you do, and how it turns out.