Topic: So which BIR style dish have you cooked that comes closest to your local BIRs?

[meggeth]

Never been to Redcar steelworks, but spent many, many hours at Teesside. Not sure if that's a good thing or not.....

[goncalo]

For me it's the Chicken Korma and Chicken Tikka Masala with Taz Base. Pilau rice is only subtly different.

[goncalo]

Stephen

Any thoughts as to why? Any common denominator between the three dishes?

Well I have to thank curryhell for the brinjal recipe which my g/f says is a 100% clone of what she used to order in Northamptonshire. In that sense I got lucky on the back of CH's efforts, fine chap that he is.

As for the PJ and Pathia, it's been down to extensive and meticulous experimentation with notes taken at each stage.  By meticulous I mean changing only one ingredient each time the recipe has been revised. By extensive I mean persevering for weeks if not months until I got what I thought was as close as possible. G/F and I had a PJ and Ceylon tonight and she said the PJ was as good as any curry she's ever had. I won't argue with such praise  .

I know there's been a bit of a debate on the site about whether cookery is art or science. I tend to think it's both and that empirical process of testing, reviewing, refining and then completing this loop again and again is the science bit, which with some experience behind you can become art like due to judgement calls about what goes with what.

I play guitar and it's a bit like you have to get the technique first but when you couple that with creativity (i.e. choice of notes) then that's where music starts to happen.

I also think I've nailed the Chasni (the tartan curry as some call it) and a few others but the one's I mentioned first have become my highlights.

I play guitar too and I can see where you are coming from Stephen. I've made a conscious decision not to learn theory so that my ability to compose would be 70% feeling and 30% technique. However, I think I need to disagree with you that creativity cannot be an essencial element to discovering the BIR taste. It can be, if you are doing it on a trial and error basis and using your brains to fill the gaps of your recipes. Then again, this is me thinking loudly. I'm also an engineer and I tend to think everything in mathematical terms, so sometimes I tend to follow a "scientifical approach to cooking".

This also makes me realize something interesting after revisiting this thread. Some of the "highly spoken" members of this forum claim they don't attain that taste reliably everytime, to paraphrase Phil, "on a good/bad day", etc. Not that it is a bad thing, but seeing how far I've come with only a few successful recipes (and a ton of appreciation for everyone leading me in the (hopefully) right direction to BIR taste) I feel quite proud and grateful for the efforts of many. I am not as ambitious as some of you, having mostly stuck with the bangladeshi curries in Cambridge, but I know it is a hard path, especially when you are starting fresh like me

[Kashmiri Bob]

Well, I've just polished off the left-overs from another home delivery from the TA I referred to on page 3.  They now have a new chef!  Anyway, ordered 2 pops, a chicken pathia, a chicken rezala, and a portion of boiled rice.  Got 3 pops, bought-in onion salad, and yogurt mint dip.  Freshest pops I've had in ages; perfect, as was the onion salad.  The previous chef did a bright green mint dip, which despite the colour was basically OK.  The new Chef