Tell me the curry secret!!?

[MermaidTears]

To ask if anyone out there knows the secret. Or has a husband who works in an Indian restaurant and knows?

We have a curry every single Saturday night, our long running tradition.
We just worked out we spend around 1300 a year on takeaways! 25 every Saturday (roughly)

I have tried every single recipe, every book, every supermarket Fakeaway they never taste like the restaurant ones!

We have been to Goa and the food was heavenly.
There must be a secret ingredient that I don't know? Anyone out there know?

We need to cut back our finances, and tbh what we spend on takeaways could pay for half towards our trip to Goa

To sum it up for us all, base gravy sauce, mostly onions. Lots of ghee. Salt. Oil.

Let's get cooking

i live near a take away and i have noticed the bulk delivery of pataks curry sauces and some poor sod sat with a massive sack of onions near the door peeling them all day.
In fact i very rarely eat indians these days as they nearly all taste the same wherever you go. I do make the effort to eat indian food when its clear that they don't just bulk buy catering packs of sauces in

dowhat just by luck my mil gave me a gigantic old fashioned cooking pot that's apparently too big for her stove. I shoved it in the shed haha must go dig it out and give it a wash.

Do huge quantities and freeze

Tons of onions, ginger, garlic, salt and oil.

Thanks to hellswelshy for the This Muslim Girl Bakes blog link. The family I mentioned above are Pakistani Muslims and there's lots of things on her blog that looks like the food that they cooked - I shall try a few of those.

I already have a giant pan - I think it came from TK Maxx or Home Sense, or you can get them from Ikea I think, markets or Asian grocers.

What you're looking for is how to cook British Indian restaurant style, not authentic Indian. The Curry Secret comes close, but it's possible to do better - search for Julian Voight on YouTube, and also have a look at these e-books - very reasonably priced, and worth every penny, in my opinion. Mick, aka Curry Barking Mad, has done tons of hands on research at various Indian restaurants, and Julian used to have his own curry takeaway. He also has a very good e-book available, but I don't have the link to hand.

17 years ago we moved to the rural depths of Ireland, and there were no Indian restaurants within 30 miles - I learned to make them in desperation, and can honestly say I really can do it now - my curries taste like takeaways (maybe an odd thing to boast about!). The secret is in the pre-cooking - base gravy and main ingredient - I batch cook everything and freeze it - and then (once defrosted) it only takes the time you'd normally wait for a takeaway to be cooked :) Result!

Your welcome mermaid! Yes have learnt by watching DH, yep they don't want customers nicking their recipes or they won't come anymore, sods!

Evaporated milk and sugar(!) for korma

Just noticed you like Dhansak - if you get the e-books I mentioned above - the recipe in the first book (without the pineapple) is much better than the one in the second book (with the pineapple), I think :)

ghee and fresh everything

Oh, and finally - I found Julian and Mick through this forum - loads of good advice and recipes there from people who are real curry nuts :)

So I'm confused - if you make up a big batch of curry 'base' and freeze it etc, how do you then go turning it into different curries so quickly? Is it just throwing in precooked veg + meat + yoghurt/cream?

While there are a load of curry lovers here, anyone got any authentic takeaway recipes for korma/daal/palak paneer and whatever the delicious cauliflower and potato thing in a spicy tomato gravy is called?

Ghee, salt and butter. Lots and lots.

The south Indian restaurant near me used to do a student deal - £200 up front and you got a dinner of curry delivered to your door each night for a month. I am eternally regretful I never ordered it.

FurryDogMother is right. I bought The Curry Secret years ago and found it a bit faffy and the taste wasn't quite right.

Following Mick's recipes and the YouTube videos, I learned to make chicken tikka masala that tastes every bit as good as the takeaway ones, if not better - my family prefer mine, plus it doesn't cost £40 for all of us! And it's not a huge faff at all, as long as I do some of the work the day before.

A stick blender is your friend for the base sauce.

Haven't RTFT so sorry if this has already been said; my son worked briefly in a very prestigious curry house and I was majorly disappointed that they use curry paste (korma, dhansak, tikka, bhuna etc) and then add cream and evaporated milk! So no secret spice mix unfortunately.

Just to add that he told me that the onion/tomato/green pepper etc are pan fried before serving, they aren't actually cooked in with the curry.

If you want authentic Indian, rather than Indian Takeaway, I have found the first Prashad cookbook to be amazing.. I have recently moved from a bit of London with proper Indian restaurants everywhere, to somewhere v rural and this book is better than all the takeaways here!

Interestingly, some recipes use no onions at all, and although a lot of oil is chucked about, I have found you can easily halve it with no difference in taste, so think the spice mixture and the order you add them to the pan (which she is very big on) seems to make the difference.

(Prashad is the little ex laundrette indian restaurant in Bradford that came second in the Gordon Ramsay Britain's best restaurant TV series)

Pataks curry paste and coconut milk. Also Jamie Oliver does a pretty good homemade curry paste.

This is very very good.

www.spicebox.co.uk/

They make up all the spices for you for the curry you have chosen online (I really think the key is in the spice mix and quality and these guys nail it).

Then you add meat/veg etc.

Tastes amazing - especially if you make it the day before.

My mum cooks the best chicken curry. It's on the bone, which makes it more juicy. Basically she chops the onion finely, and fries in vegetable oil (never used ghee. This is a Carribean curry so a bit different from an Indian.) She leaves it to fry for ages, until it goes translucent. Then she adds spices- garam masala, tumeric, ground coriander, curry powder and jeera. Leaves that to fry. Add a bit of water so it can turn to a paste. Add the chicken, some potato, salt, a bit more water and leave until the chicken has cooked.

A friend taught us to cook two Indian curries once (he ran a takeaway). He told us that they make a base sauce, and most curries are derived from that sauce. We cooked two curries to feed three and I reckon we (well, DH) cut about a dozen onions. We made a pathia and jalfrezi from this but can't remember what we did. We did think that it was so much easier to order a takeaway!!

Madhur Jaffrey has never failed me yet even though I can few my arteries hardening just reading the recipes at the amount of salt and ghee.

I have The Curry Secret book but the only recipe from it that I really rate is the Doner Kebab one. It is awesome and an absolute favourite in this house. I wouldn't ever eat a Doner Kebab from a takeaway but this one is really tasty.

Someone upthread mentioned South Indian dishes being completely different. I have to concur - we went to a South Indian restaurant in Copenhagen of all places. The food was amazing! Totally different to the Indian I've been eating and cooking for years. I think I ate my own weight in Dosa that night.

The Spice Tailor original tikka masala (available in tesco) is fairly close to takeaway standard. Cheap, quick n easy too.