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🍛 British Indian restaurant

Base gravy, mix powder and the curry-house system built on them.

8 pages in this section

Base gravy recipe
The full restaurant batch — about four litres, and a freezer full of curries
The standard British Indian restaurant base gravy: two and a half kilos of onions simmered with carrot, pepper, garlic and ginger, blended smooth and thinned to single-cr…
BIR base gravy
The onion gravy at the heart of every British curry house
Base gravy is the mild, smooth, onion-heavy sauce that British Indian restaurants make in bulk and turn into dozens of different curries in minutes. It is the largest-vol…
BIR chicken jalfrezi
Green chilli, blistered peppers and onion that still has some crunch
The curry-house jalfrezi: a medium-hot, tomato-sharp curry built on base gravy, with chunks of onion and green pepper stir-fried hard so they keep their bite.
BIR chicken madras
Hot, red, tomato-heavy and finished with lemon
The curry-house madras: a hot, smooth, tomato-forward curry made from base gravy, defined by a generous spoon of chilli powder and a squeeze of lemon at the end.
BIR mix powder
The house blend that goes into everything
Mix powder is the standard spice blend of the British curry house — coriander, cumin, turmeric and paprika with a little garam masala — used in the base gravy and in ever…
Cooking a BIR curry
High heat, staged ladles, and the slight catching that makes it taste like a takeaway
The curry-house method: a very hot pan, spices fried briefly in oil, then base gravy added in stages so the edges catch and caramelise. Six to eight minutes from start to…
Pre-cooked chicken for curries
The other half of the curry-house trick
British Indian restaurants poach chicken in advance in a lightly spiced liquid so it can be finished in a curry in five minutes. Doing the same at home is what makes BIR …
Small-batch base gravy
About a litre, in an ordinary saucepan, for four curries
A scaled-down British Indian restaurant base gravy for home cooks without a stockpot — roughly 1.2 litres, enough for four curries, in under an hour.