Reply to What's the best bottled Indian sauce?

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Reply to "What's the best bottled Indian sauce?"

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Well, I will say if you are trying to replicate good Indian restaurant fare, no premade sauce will ever come close. I should know, kids love Indian food and I try to make it a lot and had many misses over the years. Sauces I use are edible, and kids like it and eat it. One they like is Aldi's Tikka Masala.  Does it taste like restaurant one? Not at all. But, it tastes ok, and they eat it. I do sauté onions and garlic first and add turmeric and some curry powder and a chicken cube, and pepper and hot spur red chilies, well, you get the point. It is pretty tasty, we call it mom's version. I do make curry with dry spices. I do wonder why cant they make a good sauce to taste like one in a restaurant?[/quote]

Why can't you make good sauce and spices?  The reason is that most of the spices are seed based. Once you crush the seed into a powder, the taste and smell of the oil within the seeds is what bring flavor to the dish.  The fragrance, taste and freshness of the essential oil does not last for very long and so spices even in powder form will not remain fresh for long. . Also, onions, garlic and ginger are main component of most sauces and to preserve it in a bottle you have to add preservatives and chemicals. They change the taste of the sauces. Fresh onions give a sweet taste to sauce and if you are putting it in a bottle, invariably you are going to be adding sugar to make up for the loss of flavor. Fresh tomatos add acidity and tartness to the sauce. You put it in a bottle and to preserve the color and taste you will add some citric acid etc.

Never buy your Indian spices from a mainstream grocery store. Buy MDH brand from Indian stores because the turnover is very quick, the spices are inexpensive because of volume sale and you are guaranteed the freshest, most fragrant spices.

Similarly, most Indian sauces also have paste of fresh ginger and garlic.  I use the bottled ginger-garlic paste and the taste is not that great.  The days I have time and energy, I will use the fresh ginger and garlic and the dish is beyond amazing.

Finally - you can stick to just frying the onions (aka - browning it without burning) and freezing that.  Frying onions is time consuming and messy. If you can just get the frying onion out of the way, making the sauces is not that hard. When you need to  make a sauce,

1) Put some frozen fried onions (1 cup) in a saucepan with some cooking oil on medium heat. 
2) Add some ginger-garlic paste  (2 table spoon) in the onion and mix and cook till the paste turn into a pink color and there is a good aroma from the mixture.
3) Add chopped tomatoes (1 cup) + chopped cilantro (1/4 cup) and continue cooking till the tomatoes become soft and mushy and incorporated with the onions and garlic-ginger paste. 
4) Add some salt (1/3 tsp), turmeric powder (1/4 tsp), red chilli powder (1/4 tsp), cumin powder(1/3 tsp) and coriander (cilantro) seed(1/2 tsp) powder, and simmer.  This is your basic sauce.  
5)  Simmer your veggie or meat (1 1/2 - 2 cups) in this sauce till it is cooked through, by covering the pan, and occasionally stirring. Add small amount of water if the curry becomes too thick or start to stick to the pan.  Evaporate the water by heating if the curry becomes too watery.

When you want to become more adventurous, try adding small amounts of spices in this mixture to change the flavor. Cardamom, cloves, nutmeg, bay leaves, fennel, poppy seeds, curry leaves, shredded coconut, yogurt...the variations are endless. [/quote]

Thank you for explaining! I never realized any of it. I have no issue with frying onions, it is a base for most of my own Eastern European cuisine, and find it easy, yes browning without burning. It is just that I am never sure how much spices to add. Who would have thought that Eastern European mom would have two Indian food obsessed kids? Indian food got my kids to try so many new foods, even veggies they refused before. It is awesome! Thanks for measures for spices! I did find that curries are best heated on the stove the next day, not in the microwave. Is that just me, or does it ring true for you as well?[/quote]

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