I think you have some very sweeping generalisations there!

Some people dislike it, but not everyone.

I'm Indian (Mamta's daughter, and run this site) and I like both authentic home-style food and British curry house food.

Some dishes within those curry houses are much closer to what one might find in India / homes and others are not at all. It depends on what you order.

When curry houses started gaining in popularity a lot of dishes were adapted to the prevailing British tastes at the time.

Incidentally, certainly in London anyway, there are many more genuinely authentic Indian restaurants too.

As for finding recipes, you can buy books and find websites which do totally give you instructions for replicating the curry house style dishes at home, if that's what you want to do.

This website happens to be predominantly about making home-style food, not just Indian, though majority of the recipes are Indian, not all. That's because this website started out very much for our own family to share family recipes via the web, based as we are in different countries.

Lastly, there's nothing to expose, I think many people who eat at British curry houses know that the food may not be much like that eaten in Indian homes, but that's not the point.

Restaurant goers are not always looking for (or even interested in) authentic and that's totally fine. Going to restaurants isn't a cultural activity, that has to be judged on authenticity, it's going out to eat food one enjoys, whatever that might be.

I don't think there is a huge secret behind British curry house cooking. If you go onto youtube you and do a search for it you will find that there are quite a few videos on the subject. The base sauce is made up from onions, ginger, garlic, water, oil, spices, salt, potato, lentils, tinned tomatoes, salad peppers and a few other odds and sods, all in varying quantities, obviously. Like most restaurants, the chefs will be working to order and there will be a time limit, so there has to be a lot of Mise en place beforehand. Good Indian food takes time to prepare and can't just be churned out in minutes. I'm sure there are a number of good restaurants in the UK that are serving traditional Indian food, but most are just serving fusion food. Incidentally I have only ever visited curry houses that are selling the usual BIR stuff.

I watched a video on YT a few weeks ago, showing how to make onion bhajis (pakoras) like the restaurants/take aways do. What they do is add sliced onions into a bowl and then mix in some pataks kashmiri masala paste, orange food colouring, salt, ginger and garlic paste and a few different spices. Then they add a few eggs to the mixture and continue to mix it in, then they add enough gram flour to just bind it all together (the mixture looked very dry). Then they just deep fry it for about a minute and take it out of the oil. When someone orders a portion of onion bhajis they break the centre of the bhaji open and drop it into hot oil again so the centre gets cooked. I thought I would give it a go (minus the patak paste because I don't use shop bought masalas) and I managed to replicate the onion bhajis that you get from the take aways, but the only problem I found was that because the mixture was bound together will egg instead of water, they absorbed a lot more oil. When cooked using water the outside gets sealed as soon as it hits the oil.

This site shows up a lot on the first page of a google search. I guess this topic will get a few more hits to the site. LOL. ;o)

Sid

Incidentally, when I make onion pakoras (bhaji to me is a dry fried dish) at home I never add garlic to them. I like to keep it simple and I always flatten mine before I put them into the oil. I'm not sure, but I think koftas are the ones that are rolled into balls.

Sid

I agree with what Kavey has said on the restaurant style curries.

Onion bhajies (pakoras to us) or any other bhajies for that matter, do not have eggs in India, because pakoras are supposed to be vegetarian. Adding eggs to a batter is not an Indian thing. If you add a spice mix, like chaat masala (bought or home made one), that is okay in my view. It saves you having a lot of different spices in your cupboard, especially if you cook Indian food only now and then. Otherwise, adding things like salt, black salt, cumin powder, chilli, amchoor, carom, a little dry methi leaves etc. gives them a lovely flavour.

If you buy pakoras in a restaurant/tea-house, they often double fry their pakoras. This not only saves them time, but also make them crisper, thus tastier. The only draw back is that it makes them absorb a lot more oil, which restaurants are not worried about!

Double frying is a common practices with cauliflower pakoras, even at home; you fry them half way, allow to cool and then press them to flatten them a little. Then re-fry them just before serving. Then taste the difference!

ooh, my favorite soap box subject.

Indian restaurants in the UK (and other countries, I can testify) serve mostly 'matrix' dishes. These assume a 'curry' is a meat with a sauce (and that is why most of them have a very poor vegetarian menu).

To cook a particular 'dish', the meat of choice is fried (or in the case of lamb, re-fried) in a pan, and a few spices which may highlight the dish, are added. Then the stock sauce, mentioned by Sid, above, is added and the lot heated until at serving temperature. Then coriander is usually sprinkled on top. Other things can be added, but this is restaurant dependent, usually.

So, you have a hot, spicy meal in minutes, instead of the 30 - 150 minutes it might take to make a real one. The stock sauce is usually made from the cheapest ingredients, and unique to a restaurant. That means that each restaurant has its own 'flavour', but that flavour pervades all the dishes made from the same sauce. It is not an exaggeration to say that 'different dishes' in the same restaurant taste more similar to each other than to the same dish in another restaurant.

For those who want a restaurant style recipe, make a sauce from whatever you like. Then, to turn that sauce into a dish 'made with especially selected herbs and spices' add :

Korma: coconut powder and butter/spread

Madras: 2 tsp chilli powder

vindaloo: 3-4 tsp chilli powder (and potatoes)

phall as much chilli powder as you can

Kashmiri: tomatoes and lychees

dhansak: lentils and pineapple

Ceylon: any fruit

masala: cream

TCM: colour and cream

bhuna: anything

Although the dishes served in Indian restaurants might satisfy, they cannot be said to represent the dishes of India. And my experience is that some restaurants in India are not much better! They have too much oil and too much spice in them. Now I wonder where they got that from?

What bothers me is when you make an Indian dish for someone and that person is judging it by what they get from the local take away.

Sid.

I once made an Indian meal for friends, one of whom is a millionaire. His mother asked me to prepare it, and she said she loved chicken pasanda. Once prepared, and served with simple accompaniments, we started to eat. There was total silence for three minutes, after which everyone agreed it was the best Indian food they had ever tasted (even though pasanda is a Pakistani dish!). It was only spoilt by the request for 'next time, maybe a Madras'. You can't win!!

I prepared a three course meal for 16 people at an equestrian centre for some friends. The timing was critical, and I had to work to a strict time schedule. I made shami kebab as a starter, and chicken pasanda for mains, fresh fruit salad for sweet. For quickness, I put muckwash on the table too, only to return to the table after serving everyone their main course to see the partner of the centre putting muckwash on her chicken.

What is muckwash? Is it something that involves the use of fennel seeds?

Sid.

yes, its my way of saying makwas, or pan masala. It has fennel seeds in, and is a muck cleaner for the mouth and a breath freshener. In India, usually wrapped in a betel leaf.

?even though pasanda is a Pakistani dish!?

LOL! India and Pakistan were collectively called India when this dish was first made, hence it is called Indian, as with most other ?Indian? food. The word pasand or pasanda means like, as in ?mujhe chicken pasand hai?; I like chicken.

Muckwash; LOL. Lapis, you brought a smile to my face this morning :-).

The word is actually Mukhwas ; mukh + was, was pronounced with a soft s. Mukh means mouth, was means smell. Mukhwas means something that removes the smell of food from the mouth or freshens the mouth. So, Muck + wash does make some sense LOL, but is not the correct reason for its name.