JMN2 wrote:Supermarket curries are a pale imitation of the curry house offering, and I don't think I could replicate the proper CTM tarka dal mushroom pilau peshwari naan onion bhaji offering so I have stayed away from trying to cook curries. Cooking some chicken and onions and emptying a jar of supermarket CTM ready-made sauce is so different and bland and meh.
IME/O UK supermarket curries are pitched at a demographic that has perhaps minimal first-hand experience of authentic Asian food, and so are tailored to British tastes*. Heavy on meat, generally very mild spicing, extremely rich via the likes of added cream. No bones, no skin, you can eat the lot. Don't get me wrong I really enjoy a good Brit curry, but beyond the underlying broad spice-palette it hasn't a huge amount in common with what you'll find in Asia.
Another example is if you order a Brit seafood curry it'll usually be prawns. In Asia IME the typical seafood curry would be fish [or squid], usually dense oily fish, skin on bone-in, and cut in pieces say 2-3cm thick 'cross-ways', so each disc-shaped piece has a length of spine at say 12 O'clock, and the ribs running off it below. When it's cut like that it can withstand cooking, whereas a skinned fillet of a British white fish would perhaps completely disintegrate during cooking.
The typical Brit curry-house offerings can get closer to the authentic thing. But odds on that curious [and delicious!] British invention chicken tikka masala will be prominent on the menu. In one way you might be able to make a case that a proportion of what you find in a Brit-Indian restaurant is what you might expect to find at say an Indian wedding feast. It is certainly not everyday food over their way.
I have cooked up a curry from the fresh base spices, but have found you have to take great care with the measurements/proportions. IME it's not hard to get something or other over/represented in the mix. You also have to use the freshest spices possible, most lose pungency quickly, and veeery quickly after being ground. For that reason and for simplicity I tend to buy premixed curry powder and pastes for curries.
I'd recommend anyone with a visit to or stop-over in SE Asia buy some pre-mix powder/pastes. They're cheap and authentic. I actually usually prefer a Malay curry blend over Indian, it's a bit more aromatic/less of a blunt-tool [less cumin?]. This is the versatile curry powder I like:
Baba [Baba's] brand -
http://www.malaysianfood.net/ordermsiancurry.htm comes in 100 or 250gm bags, cheap as chips.
Pantai paste - good brand for Thai pastes, example >
https://www.amazon.com/Pantai-Green-Cur ... B00V4RXIGQIf buying similar to these I'd also suggest picking up some freeze-dried coconut powder, again cheap as anything in SE Asia, and weighs almost nothing in your luggage. Such as Kara coconut cream [or milk, your choice how you mix it] powder -
http://www.kara.com.my/c/coconut-cream-milk-powder Costs S$0.70 in Singapore, = 40p, makes 300Ml of milk, 150Ml of cream.
p.s. @RedS -'
'It is the same with spices though, I used to read that you should fry the spices but then I saw some Indian on Stein's programme adding water with the spices so as not to burn them, so I'm not sure now.'Agreed you have to cook-off the spices. a) it helps develop and bring out their aroma b) it spreads their flavour into the cooking oil which then permeates the ingredients added later. IME if you don't cook off your spices their flavour is very 'blunt', really quite harsh and one dimensional.
When cooking off spices I use oil but also sometimes later add some water, that is if the spices absorb the oil leaving a dryish pan, and/or if it's getting too hot and risking burning the spice. You could of course just add more oil, but risk ending up with a finished dish swimming in it.