It's Curry o'clock
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- Category: Blog Entries
- Published on Friday, 12 March 2010 13:38
- Written by Alex Vokes
- Hits: 251
I've spent the last week researching curries and in particular how the restaurants and takeaways make it. Previously when making a curry I would fry spices in a wok, add onions, garlic and ginger, and then meat. Yoghurt, cream, a tin of tomatoes could all be participants in the recipe but I never really reached the same consistency as my local takeaway. I tried liquidizing onions and adding that to the wok and this did start to improve matters. My main problem is that you'd end up with too much liquid and invariably you'd have to add ground almonds or dessicated coconut to soak up some of the juices released from the meat. Tins of tomatoes also seem so have a pocket of water that would contribute to the mix.
So what is the answer? Well I stumbled across it at work. A colleague of mine said he'd heard of a website that could help people to make curries just like you get in a restaurant. I was quite skeptical at first, but after reading up on some of the techniques I was intrigued enough to give it a go. It seems that the first stage involves creating a base sauce. This is basically a big tub of soup with some spices that forms the basis of 80% of all curries. Once the base sauce is completed it can be added to the spices and this forms the basis of your curry. It sounded good thus far, so armed with a large pot and some vegetables I followed the recipe and produced around 2.5 litres of a sort of sour soup. I even bought a mooli! I always wanted to buy one, but I could never think of anything I could cook with it.
So tonight I thought I would take my base sauce for a spin and make a korma. I thought that a korma would be a good test as it is mostly sauce based and quite a delicate flavour. This would test the quality of the sauce and the balance of the spices. So brandishing my new balti dish I set to work. Frying some garlic, I then added the spice mix and some sugar and salt. I began to mix this slowly and started to add the base sauce. Coconut, cream and chicken were all added and with some trepidation I tried the sauce.... Awesome! I was skeptical but now I'm a convert. The korma was perhaps a bit sweet, but other than that pretty damn close to a takeaway. I think with a few tweaks this could become a regular activity because the curry literally took 30mins to make from scratch.
So up next... Bhuna!
Cooking
