Topic: Introduced American friends to BIR

[bhamcurry]

Their first experience with BIR style curry. He's a local lad, she's the daughter of Vietnamese immigrants who kept on boasting about her spice tolerance.

Menu was pilau rice, tarka dal, paneer korma, chicken dansak, and chicken balti vindaloo. Pudding was gulab jamun.

She couldn't finish her vindaloo, it was too spicy   

All in all, a success. And I have plenty of the precooked chicken left to make myself a dopiaza!

[Robbo141]

I’m sure there’s a market for BIR restaurant / takeout here in the US.  Traditional Indian everywhere, some OK but man, I’d be a regular if there was BIR here.
Hey bham- care to share your balti vindaloo recipe?  Vindaloo is my go to dish.

Robbo

[bhamcurry]

happy to share, Robbo!

It was based mostly on The Curry Guy lamb vinadloo from his first book. The changes I made were:

use the balti aromatics (sweet peppers and onion); swapped out the hot peppers he called for with what I had to hand - some ripe red jalapenoes a colleague gave to my wife, along with 5 dried Indian red chillies soaked in hot water for about an hour. Toss in the soaked chillies along with the water.

Cook it balti style. I expected it to be hot, didn't expect it to do a slow, evil, mounting heat until it was "holy receptacles, I will regret this later".

Take this recipe and smash it together with a basic balti recipe, and play around with *which* chillies you use. The more different chillies you use, the more you can bring out the flavours and character of each chili pepper.

https://www.cooked.com/uk/Dan-Toombs/Quadrille-Publishing/The-Curry-Guy/The-classic-British-curries/Lamb-vindaloo-recipe


p.s. yes, I did regret it later. Didn't stop me having more later, I just chased it down with a load of plain yoghurt 

[bhamcurry]

forgot to ask, where you based, Robbo?

I'm in Birmingham, Alabama. Originally Edinburgh.

[Robbo141]

Thank you!  I will definitely give this a bash.  I’m based in a lovely little town called Waxhaw, just south of Charlotte, NC.  Originally Sunderland.  Quite the change, been here 7 years, never going back.  We have a few Indian places here, including a couple of white tablecloth places highly rated but never to be visited by me.  Best place actually has Nepalese chefs, I’ve got to know them very well over the years. Good curry but not quite BIR…

We have a similar outlook to regret.  Never stops me going back for more.

I could relate a particular incident after a visit to the Bashundora in Sutton Coldfield many moons ago but let’s not go there.

Robbo

[bhamcurry]

16 years next month for us. Couldn't afford to move back, everything is so stupidly expensive, and that's leaving aside that the national and regional UK governments seem to have all gone bat poop insane.