I've made a huge curry for a birthday party. Unfortunately the sauce is way too hot. Do you have any tips on how I could save the curry by making it milder?
I'd like to prepare one of your dishes for a dinner party I intend to host for 8 people. Can I simply multiply the amounts in the recipe by 4?
Although a novice in the kitchen I followed your instructions to the letter. However, my
Basic Curry Sauce barely measured 5 fl.oz when I had finished. Any ideas what happened?
Have you got a recipe for .......?
I've read your recipes with interest but would like to know whether they freeze well. As someone who often eats alone, I like to cook in bulk!
Your balti / korma / whatever doesn't taste like the one in my local restaurant. How come?
I really love the sweetness you get in restaurant curries. How can I get that at home?
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I've made a huge curry for a birthday party. Unfortunately the sauce is way too hot. Do you have any tips on how I could save the curry by making it milder?
This is a tricky question and not easily answered. I have never found a successful way of reducing chilli heat once you have introduced it.
So you will need either to disguise the heat or to dilute it.
Adding sweet ingredients or extra oil will disguise the heat. In other words, the heat will still be the same but adding sweetness or extra oil will reduce the burn in the mouth.
Coconut milk is the obvious choice as it adds both sweetness and fats. True, you will change the character of your curry but you can pretend that it was going to be a coconutty curry all along!
My strong advice, whatever you decide, is to experiment on a small amount of sauce first before you alter the whole batch. Play about until you find a taste that you like.
The other way is to dilute the sauce.
This is more time consuming as you will need to make another, smaller, batch of sauce WITHOUT ANY CHILLI POWDER and then add it to the existing batch. If you want to preserve the intended style of your curry then this is the only practical solution in my opinion.
Another way of diluting the curry is to bulk it out with other ingredients such as vegetables or pulses. With Indian-style curries I would suggest using red lentils (masoor dhal).
I'd like to prepare one of your dishes for a dinner party I intend to host for 8 people. Can I simply multiply the amounts in the recipe by 4?
Most of the recipes in the public area and all the recipes in the Premium Area are designed to feed 2 people. The recipes will double up quite well if you use a large enough pan but, beyond that, they do not scale up very well at all and were never designed to.
I am planning to add a few more larger-portioned recipes to the public area in the future but, for now, the only true recipe for feeding 8 is my latest autumn recipe.
So the solution is rather complicated.
Each portion of Basic Curry Sauce will make 2 curries so that's 4 portions. So if you make one doubled-up batch of Basic Curry Sauce that should do you.
The curry is a different matter. You will have to make 2 doubled-up recipe amounts in separate pans to give 8 portions. Restaurant style curries are essentially stir-fries. If you try and make a quadrupled batch all in one large pan you will end up with a curried stew rather than a restaurant style curry.
Although the Balti recipe will feed 4 it is already doubled up so you will still need to make 2 batches of the recipe in 2 separate pans.
For the recipes in The Curry House Cookery Book the solution is slightly different. Please see "Recipe Notes" in the Help section of the Premium Area. The book also has menu planners for meals for 2, 4 and 6 people with extensive instructions and a timetable for making the meal.
Although a novice in the kitchen I followed your instructions to the letter. However, my
Basic Curry Sauce barely measured 5 fl.oz when I had finished. Any ideas what happened?
I've made the Basic Curry Sauce a hundred times and, although it does vary, I always get about 8-10 fl.oz of thick concentrated sauce. Enough for 2x2 portions of main meal curries unless you like loads of sauce. The recipe is meant for restaurant-style amounts of sauce which is further cut with oil in the main recipe.
So ... what could the problem be?
Size of onion? Use a larger one. It should weigh about 6oz after peeling
Cut down on the garlic? What, you want fresh breath? Don't.
Used thin little garlic cloves? Use big fat ones or double up the amount.
Cut down on the fresh ginger? Don't. The pungent flavour mellows with cooking.
Did you add passata (puréed, sieved tomatoes)? You didn't use what we British call "tomato purée" did you? That's what the rest of the world correctly calls tomato paste. You don't want tomato paste you want the sloppy, runny stuff sold in jars or Tetrapaks. Make sure you get the plain stuff (not flavoured with herbs or anything else); just pure puréed, sieved tomatoes.
Did you add the 4fl oz of water?
Did you scrape all that lovely sauce out of your blender after the puréeing? You can waste a lot that way. I use a rubber spatula to get all the sauce out. Similarly, scrape all the sauce out of the pan after cooking.
Or perhaps you just cooked the sauce for too long? As long as you didn't cut down on the other ingredients then just add water to bring the volume of sauce up to 9 fl.oz. If you've got some sauce left in your blender hiding in the corners and under the blade then whizz the water around in the blender first to get every last drop of sauce into your curry.
Have you got a recipe for .......?
Please, DO NOT ASK FOR RECIPES. All the recipes that I'm willing to publish for free are here in The Curry House public area. The Curry House Cookery Book should take care of 99% of recipe requests but you will need to pay a registration fee before you can unlock the Premium Area where the book is located.
Before I asked visitors to The Curry House to stop making recipe requests, the 4 most sought after recipes were :
onion bhajees
the minty yoghurt sauce that comes with poppadoms
nan bread
pilau rice
You can find all those recipes in the book. To see a complete list of recipes in the book go here
I've read your recipes with interest but would like to know whether they freeze well. As someone who often eats alone, I like to cook in bulk!
Curries never freeze well in my opinion. The freezing seems to dull the flavour of the spices and the garlic.
Your best bet is to freeze the Basic Curry Sauce (BCS). Either make a batch just to freeze or use any you have left over after making another curry. It is then quick and easy to knock up a curry using a regular recipe. If the recipe itself does not contain garlic (i.e. the garlic comes only from the BCS) I often add just the tip of a teaspoon of dried garlic powder to refresh the taste if using previously frozen BCS.
This method has far better results than freezing the complete curry in my experience.
Your balti / korma / whatever doesn't taste like the one in my local restaurant. How come?
Restaurant recipes are not set in stone and can vary considerably from one restaurant to another or even within a restaurant depending on which chef happens to be on duty. The general style of cooking also varies from one region of the UK to another and, even more so, between Indian restaurants in the UK and in other countries.
Whilst I think the free restaurant-style recipes here in the public area are good, the revised versions in the Premium Area are much closer to the ones you'll find in the majority of standard Bangladeshi-run curry houses.
I really love the sweetness you get in restaurant curries. How can I get that at home?
In general the sweetness in curries comes from 2 sources (neither is sugar or honey as some people think).
The first is onions which need long, slow cooking to bring out their natural sweetness. Make sure you cook the Basic Curry Sauce for a nice long time.
Secondly - oil and lots of it. Oil enhances flavours and gives it's own sweetness (think of deep fried food if you don't believe me).
Think how much oil you find in the serving dish at the restaurant. My Basic Curry Sauce recipe doesn't need as much oil as a restaurant curry for it to cook properly. It's not a scaled-down version of how they make it in restaurants but a good version for the sort of quantities you need at home. So ... hike up the oil (ghee preferably) if you are really trying to re-create your favourite restaurant dish at home.
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