Topic: My best base to date

[extrahotchillie]

Hi all
This weekend I made my best base to date based on Kris Dhillions recipe with a few added extras, here goes.

Part 1.
Usual 2lbs of onions roughly chopped.
2oz fresh ginger peeled.
2oz fresh garlic peeled.
Blended ginger & garlic with 1/2 pint of water.
Added 2.5 pints of water to a large heavy saucepan, bring to the boil.
Added onions, ginger & garlic blend, 1tsp rock salt,2 very large pieces of cinnamon sticks,7 cloves,7 green cardamoms,7 dried red chili's,1 tsp funugreek leaves, 5 bay leaves and 1 heaped Tbsp of garam masala, and boiled with the lid on for 1hr 15Min's.

Part 2.
In another large heavy saucepan I heated 10tbsp of oil, added 1tsp paprika, 1tsp turmeric, 1tsp ground coriander, 500 grams of passata and 142 grams of double concentrated tomato puree, boiled on a high heat for 10 Min's stirring continually (man it didn't half spit & splash) then cooked on a very low heat for about 5 Min's.

Part 3.

Usual thing, leave part 1 to cool remove cinnamon sticks & bay leaves and blend until absolute smooth. The blended colour was quite brown and not a bluely green sort of colour as before.
Returned it to a clean large heavy saucepan and added part 2, brought to the boil and skimmed off the froth as usual.

Using this base I made a chicken do piazza & a chicken madras and both without a doubt was my best tasting efforts to date, I wont go into how I made the meals because we all have our own methods, but I have found that if I use about 10 Tbsp of oil I get great results, you can always spoon of the excess oil, but I find that a lot of oil brings out the true taste of the spices; remember the good old days when we had a takeaway opened up the lid and thought thats a lot of oil but it does taste nice when it infuses into your rice.

I think its well worth a try, maybe one of you will try it, I'm off to Spain on 30th April and I will be asking the chef at the last restaurant I was in when I was over there for some more tips and I will keep you posted.

Cheers for now


Chas

[Yousef]

Hi,

Thas sounds pretty good, the only thing i would add is a whole bunch of corriander, chopped, stalks and all into the pot in Part 1.
I think this makes the difference.

S

[extrahotchillie]

cheers I will give it a go