to think that a recipe for curry should not include "jar of curry sauce"

[SPBInDisguise]

I don't need a recipe to chuck pre-made sauce over meat or prawns. I feel they are missing the point...

raisah us Bengalis aways put a bt of sugar in our curries.

*bit

5 hours to make a curry? I'm Indian, my parents are Indian, my grandparents are Indian. Most of our everyday curries take 30 mins to make (meat dishes the same though they simmer for a few hours).

Thanks for the tip re Patak's. I am the least food snob person I know and have no qualms about using jars. But a jar to me feels like the easy option, not cooking from scratch. Glad to know in the case of curry pastes, I am wrong :o

I also think that curry paste is different to a jar of sauce.

I have some great thai yellow curry paste in the fridge - it's just ground spices and lemongrass and ginger and some oil to hold it all together.

Waitrose recipe cards are like this - take 5 bits of processed food and throw them together and pretend you've cooked from scratch - it's more added value profits for the supermarket but what are BBC upto?

I read a recipe once (jamie?) That involved carefully cutting sausages open and taking the sausage meat out. Which seemed odd to me - de-processing processed food - but apparently it is valid.

It's often easier to buy good quality sausages than it is to buy good quality sausagemeat that is not currently inside a sausage.

OOps!! No wonder DH did not like the curry I made with paste. Clearly I had no clue whatsoever. In my defence I grew up with biltong and braais.

Interesting one. I always thought this too. We'd make our Thai green curry paste from scratch.

Then we went on holiday to actual Thailand & did one of those day cookery courses. They but their Thai green curry paste from the market. We did not learn to make it authentically from scratch as we'd expected.

Eye opener.

"Thai Green Curry made entirely from scratch - 23 ingredients."

And mostly unavailable where I live, so a jar of curry paste is more likely to give an authentic taste than anything I make from scratch because half the ingredients would be missing.

I think I would compare curry paste with "herbs de provence", or ginger paste in a jar, in a way.

I sometimes use it when making curry, but it depends on the recipe.

Agree with the MI and the other posters who said it does not have to take 5 hours to make an indian curry base, and there is not only one type of "base" either. The thing that can take a while is cooking down onions if the recipe calls for them, however lots of Indian food is surprisingly quick to make.

Many Indians do not put sugar or sultanas in meat curries, however in S.E.Asia they temper fiery hot dishes with palm sugar etc.

Thai curry paste is easy to make from scratch if you have a food processor or blender and the ingredient. However the Thai brand pastes are much better than the supermarket brand ones, if you are going to buy them.