Thursday 28 August - Curry Secret Curry Sauce

It's probably pretty obvious that we eat a lot of curry in this house - if George is asked what he would like to eat, he always answers curry, and will always be guaranteed to clear his plate if he's presented with it.

So I thought I'd use my time off work to fill the freezer with Curry Secret Sauce for future use.

The idea comes from this book - which gives away the secrets of British Indian Restaurants

 

 The general idea of this is to make a basic sauce and this forms the basis of many dishes - simply adding meat and spices to the sauce.

Making the sauce is a really unpleasant experience, so I made double quantities and have frozen enough to produce at least 6 meals over the next few weeks.

Stage one is to boil onions, garlic and ginger until they soften ( I bunged it all in whole rather than liquidizing the ginger and garlic as recommended in the book)

This was 4lb Onions and 3 whole bulbs of garlic.

The smell of this lot boiling for 45 minutes is particularly unpleasant!!

Once boiiled it's blended until smooth.

 

At this stage I froze an icecube tray of the blended mixture as it is used to precook meat for some of the recipes in the book.

 

The next stage is to boil a tin of blended tomatoes along with tomato puree and some chilli powder and turmeric. The recipe called for a lot of oil to be added, but I cut this down to a couple of spoons.

Once this had cooked for about 20 minutes, the green onion mixture was added to the tomatoes and simmered again for another 25 minutes.
This needed skimming as it cooked to take the froth that rose to the surface off.

The finished sauce  - ready to be portioned up and frozen.

I've left one portion out, and we will use this tonight to make Chicken Tikka Masala.