Base gravy recipe

This is the standard base, scaled down from restaurant quantities to something that fits in a large domestic stockpot. It is mild, smooth and mild-mannered by design — see BIR base gravy for why.

Ingredients¶

Makes about 4 litres · 1 hour 45 minutes

The vegetables

• 2.5 kg onions, peeled and roughly chopped
• 1 large carrot, roughly chopped
• 1 green pepper, deseeded and chopped
• ⅛ of a white cabbage, shredded (optional — adds sweetness and body)
• 4 garlic cloves and a 5 cm piece of ginger, or 3 tbsp garlic–ginger paste

The spicing

• 150 ml vegetable or rapeseed oil
• 2 tbsp turmeric
• 2 tbsp mix powder (or a mild curry powder)
• 1 tbsp paprika
• 2 tsp salt
• 400 g tin of chopped tomatoes, or 3 tbsp tomato purée
• About 3 litres of water

Method¶

1. Sweat the onions. Put the onions in the stockpot with 100 ml of the oil, 1 tsp of the salt and a splash of water. Cover and cook over a low-medium heat for 30–40 minutes, stirring occasionally, until completely soft and translucent. You are not browning them — this is the opposite of onion gravy, where colour is everything. Base gravy wants pale.
2. Add the other vegetables — carrot, pepper, cabbage, garlic and ginger — with 2 litres of the water. Bring to a simmer.
3. Simmer for 45 minutes, uncovered, until everything is falling apart. A carrot that still has any bite will show up as grit in the finished gravy.
4. Blend. Take the pot off the heat and blend with a stick blender until completely smooth — several minutes, not several seconds. Chase the last flecks. If you want restaurant-grade smoothness, pass it through a sieve afterwards.
5. Spice it. In a frying pan, heat the remaining 50 ml oil over a medium heat. Add the turmeric, mix powder and paprika and fry for 30 seconds only, stirring — they burn in the time it takes to answer a question. Tip the lot into the pot, along with the tomatoes and the rest of the salt.
6. Simmer 20 minutes more. Add the remaining water a little at a time until it is the consistency of single cream — it should run off a ladle in a stream, not a glug.
7. Taste. It should be mild, faintly sweet and slightly savoury, and feel a bit incomplete. That is correct.

Two schools on the spicing¶

Spices simmered in, as above, gives a rounded, integrated base.

Spiced oil added at the end — heating the oil, frying the spices, and stirring that in after blending — gives a brighter, more aromatic base and a visible slick of orange oil on the surface, which many restaurants consider the mark of a proper base.

Both are legitimate. Try each once.

Storing it¶

• Chilled: 3 days, in a covered container. It thickens as it cools; thin it with water when reheating.
• Frozen: 3 months. Freeze in 500 ml portions — roughly one curry — in bags laid flat, which defrost in minutes. This is the single thing that makes home BIR cooking practical.

Reheat to a gentle simmer and hold it there while you cook. Curry-house cooking needs the base hot; adding cold base to a hot pan kills the heat you need. See cooking a BIR curry.

Common mistakes¶

Browning the onions. Colour and caramelisation are wrong here. Keep the lid on and the heat moderate.

Not blending enough. The most common fault by far. Texture in the base means texture in every curry you make from it.

Making it too thick. It reduces further in the pan.

Over-spicing. Base gravy is not a curry. If it tastes of a specific spice, every dish you make will taste the same.

Burning the spices. Thirty seconds in hot oil, moving constantly, then straight into the liquid.

See also¶

• BIR base gravy · small-batch base gravy · BIR mix powder
• cooking a BIR curry · onions in gravy