“You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.”

Ever discovered that a word you’ve been hearing forever turns out to mean something different from what you thought?

‘Tosspot’ I always assumed was an alternative for ‘tosser’. It means ‘drunkard’.

‘Enormity’ doesn't mean ‘enormousness’. It can, but specifically regarding atrociousness, immoderation or extreme wickedness.

‘Dastardly’ can mean underhanded, wicked or cruel, but only secondarily. Its primary meaning is ‘cowardly’.

More fool me.

The Gravy Train and the Great Onion-off

Grossly simplified, here’s the process for cooking a British Indian Restaurant curry dish. Having invested heavily in pre-prep, you can follow the five steps below to serve pretty much any dish within ten minutes of it being ordered:

1. Warm some seasoned oil in a wok
2. Add whichever spices are unique to the dish
3. Add pre-cooked meat and/or vegetables
4. Add gravy
5. Reduce

The spices unique to any particular curry are relatively few; it’s the gravy that carries the body of the flavor, and it’s common to every dish. Madras, korma, Bombay aloo… you name it; apart from the rice, onion bhajis and naan bread, that gravy makes up the bulk of pretty much anything you’ll eat. Because it takes hours to make, and gets used up at around 300mL for each and every curry serving, it pays to make it in bulk. My last batch made nearly ten liters, sufficient for 26 curries, and lasted me two months.

But therein lies the problem. I’m still experimenting with how to cook each of the curry dishes, and if I’m tweaking the unique spices that make, say, a madras a madras, but doing nothing to experiment with the gravy, then the tests I’m running could be fairly inconsequential. I need to optimize the gravy, and that means cooking it in smaller batches. And with nearly 20 ingredients used in its preparation (onions, carrots, red and green peppers, cilantro (coriander), tomatoes, garlic, ginger, vegetable oil, water, salt, coriander (powder), cumin, asafetida, curry powder, fenugreek, turmeric, sugar, and sometimes more), there’s a crazy amount of variables to experiment with.

Fortunately, there’s an obvious starting point. As Voigt describes it:

“95% of the base gravy is onions. If you’re ever wondered what gives BIR curry that slightly sweet gravy – it’s onions. If you’ve ever wondered what gives the curry sauce its thickness – it’s onions. If you’ve ever wondered what gave BIR curry that taste – it’s onions.”

So, today’s first step: what kind of onions should I be using? I’m told that the choice of the UK restaurants is Dutch onions, but since they don’t seem to be available here in SF, today I’m just toying with what’s available, splitting the usual 10L batch four ways and pitting off white, yellow, sweet and red onions.

Five hours later, and I’ve got four saucepans of brown gravy. The white onion gravy perhaps has a hint of French onion soup to it; the red onion gravy has a hint of… how would you describe red onions? The yellow onion and sweet onion gravies are pretty similar, the former being (to my surprise) a slightly stronger flavor than the latter.

Bottom line: they all taste like gravy. I’ll have to do a split test when I make my next curries out of them, and perhaps next time I’ll experiment with onion sizes and cooking temperatures/times. But today I don’t feel like I’ve made any great revelations. And my apartment really smells of onions.