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.

Breaking the habit of a lifetime

Of everything I miss about England (friends and family excepted) good Indian food has long been at the top of the list. Back in London, it was a habit of mine to order takeout pretty much every Friday night, and save enough leftovers for ‘breakfast of the gods’ the next morning. But here in the Bay Area, the state of Indian cuisine is pretty depressing. My favorite meat dish, the chicken dhansak, is virtually impossible to come by; the onion bhaji (by far the most popular appetizer in any British Indian restaurant) I have literally never seen on a menu here; and even of the dishes that are available, that magical curry house taste just isn’t there.

It took a few years for me to act, but at the end of last year I could take it no more.

I finally kicked the habit of a lifetime – that of never, ever, ever cooking for myself – and set out on a mission to recreate the flavors I missed so badly.

First, let’s clarify that mission. What I’m trying to recreate is a style of cooking for which the usual label ‘Indian’ isn’t really suitable. The more accurate term would be ‘British Indian Restaurant’ cuisine, or ‘BIR’, a label that seems to have stuck among its fans. Not only is it clearly different from the traditional family cooking of Indian culture, it’s also increasingly not actually Indian, its recipes being shaped in large part by Pakistani and Bangladeshi influences.

In a nutshell, since the 1950s, Britain has done to curries what America did to pizza. We took a style of cuisine we liked, adapted it over decades to suit local tastes, and innovated around the theme to produce an authentic new style of cooking that stands on its own and became the new national cuisine.

As a Chicago deep-dish pizza is to ‘Italian’, so is a chicken tikka masala to ‘Indian’. The many people who tell me they’d expect the Bay Area’s curries to be pretty good on account of the migration of tech workers from India are kinda missing the point. There are sizeable Japanese populations in parts of South America, but I doubt you’d find many entertaining knife-juggling teppanyaki chefs there.

(These are terrible examples by the way. I’m really not a huge fan of Japanese-cooking-as-theater, nor, ironically, of the chicken tikka masala, but you get the point).

To my mind, once a style of cuisine has reached a critical mass of local acceptance, there’s a baseline of quality that takes root in the public consciousness (and also hegemony of spelling, though BIR isn’t quite there). A poor quality curry house in Britain simply wouldn’t last long: locals are too familiar with the baseline to stomach anything that falls below it. But here in the Bay Area – and dare I say the rest of America? – Indian food remains niche enough that a ‘common knowledge’ of baseline quality just isn’t there. And hence my absurdly ambitious goal:

I aim to cook mediocre British Indian restaurant food

…because, and please forgive my arrogance, if I can reach the level of ‘mediocre’ BIR cuisine, I’ll have exceeded the level of any of the Indian restaurants I’d be dependent on locally.

(And, once that’s achieved, I then aim to cook some truly great British Indian restaurant food. Gotta have a stretch goal).

9 months in…

Trying to solve the riddle of BIR cuisine seemed tough at first. Anyone who’s ever tried following recipes from an Indian cookery book, or bought ready-made Indian meals or sauces from supermarkets, knows that they taste absolutely nothing like restaurant food. Unlocking the secret to those magical tastes meant finding instructions from people who’ve actually worked at restaurants.

One of my earliest references was Dave Loyden’s excellent Undercover Curry, a write-up of the lessons learned by a curry fan so dedicated that he ‘quit his day job and invested three years working undercover in UK curryhouses’, as the back cover tells it. Dave’s book was an excellent starting point, but as a total newcomer to cooking I needed a lot more reference.

I discovered the work of Julian Voigt, a man who used Dave’s book as a starting point (if I understood correctly), trained himself as a curry chef and opened his own takeaway. His ebook, The Secret to that Takeaway Curry Taste (new edition due soon), is a great complement to Undercover Curry, and best of all, his YouTube videos are a great learning resource: text recipes just can’t compare to the expressive power of video demonstrations.

(A shout out also to Mick Crawford’s ‘British Indian Restaurant Style Cooking’, which had some good nuggets of useful information that the others were missing. And there’s one or two other good references too, which if you’re curious, get in touch).

So, nine months into this little endeavor, here’s where I stand:

• Pilau rice – generally good
• Chicken madras – usually bad and wildly unpredictable
• Chicken dhansak – reliably good
• Chicken korma – reliably great (I’ve really nailed this one!)
• Chicken tikka masala – bad (I think Dave Loyden’s recipe was a cruel joke. ‘Half a can of fruit cocktail’ is plausible at least, but ‘a third of a pan of ghee’ is not!). Need to try someone else’s recipe, but I was never a CTM eater in the first place, so I have little reference.
• Chicken dupiaza – once great (best dish I ever made), but I was never able to reproduce that greatness. Usually pretty good though.
• Sag aloo – reliably decent but never great
• Bombay aloo – reliably good
• Brinjal bhaji – usually good but somewhat unpredictable
• Mushroom bhaji – always at least decent
• Onion bhaji – sometimes great, sometimes poor. Usually good, but I make too many that just crumble apart, and I’m still learning how to fry them just right.

One thing I really need to work on is my pre-cooked chicken. One of the things BIR restaurants really get right is the marinade (while restaurants here in the Bay Area seem to not bother at all) so I’ve been paying particular attention, but I just can’t get the flavor right. My texture’s a little off too: aiming for juicy and tender, but too often achieving rubbery and powdery.

The beginnings of a base gravy. A pot full of onions, with a few other veg sprinkled on top.

The base gravy having stewed for a couple of hours, having been blended, diluted, and with the spices added. In another hour or two this'll be the common foundation to pretty much any curry dish. There's enough here for nearly 30 portions; it helps to make it all in one go.

Bombay aloo

Brinjal bhaji

Chicken dhansak