Base gravy for British Indian food - is it useful at home?

Base gravy for British Indian food - is it useful at home? - Smiling woman feeding man in turban

The UK has a lot of 'Indian' restaurants, which tend to be staffed by people from Bangladesh.

The menu will often have 100+ dishes available, which they need to cook using as few staff as possible, so it is my understanding that these will be made from a sauce (which seems to contain lots of onions, then garlic, ginger and spices) usually referred to as a 'base gravy', which the relevant meat and vegetables for the dish ordered will be added to.

Obviously this is an essential process in a restaurant, but there is a large community on social media of British people not of South Asian extraction who want to replicate their favourite restaurant food, and overwhelmingly this involves making a 'base gravy' first.

I live in Indonesia and know how curry is made here, and often the best places to eat might specialise in ONE dish, which is cooked from scratch ahead of time, and indeed any place that's preparing a curry from scratch after you order will tend to have bad flavour.

I'm slightly confused by this 'BIR' system, because most of the gurus (of people who want to make 'Indian restaurant' curry at home) seem not to be of South Asian origin, and nor are the people cooking it. So I'm slightly doubtful about the whole process. I'm assuming that South Asian families would tend to cook curry from scratch in much the same we do in Indonesia.

I can see that it could be advantageous if you want to eat a different curry every day for a week, or if you want to create four different curries and plate (ahem) them into aluminium foil trays to eat at the same time, as if you had just ordered an Indian takeaway. And generally, I suppose, if you create say 20 portions of 'base gravy' and then make 'curry for one', with the other 19 portions in the freezer then it could be useful. But that I think is not specific to curry, it's just meal planning, like people making 20 portions of tomato sauce or whatever else.

So the question is is there really an advantage to this as opposed to simply making a curry from scratch, or is this more a case of slavish mimickry? I presume that this cooking technique is not particularly common among British Bangladeshi people at home, for example.



Best Answer

As far as I understand, the base gravy is just something that is used to cook curries of all sorts quickly in a restaurant context, especially in BIR, British Indian Restaurant (I've not looked at other south asian curries)

The gravy is "curry" agnostic, it can be used in many different dishes.

When cooking a curry at home, you can normally take your time and create a curry dish from scratch, bypassing the base gravy.

On the other hand, making a large batch of base gravy and freeze individual portions for when you want to make a mid-week curry is something that should and could be easy to do (I think I'll try making a batch over the holidays)




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How do you make Indian base mix?

\ud83d\udd2a How to make this Indian Base GravyAdd garlic, ginger, garam masala, ground coriander, cumin, paprika, turmeric, cinnamon, salt, pepper, cardamom and tomato puree and stir together. Add chopped red and green bell pepper, chopped carrot and a tin of chopped tomatoes. Stir and bring to the boil, then simmer for 1 hour.

What is Indian cooking base?

Ginger and Garlic Paste \u2013 Curries are an integral part of Indian cuisine and at the base of these delicious meals is none other than ginger and garlic paste. Today, ready to use ginger and garlic pastes are available in the market which makes the entire cooking process more convenient.

How long does base gravy last?

The finished base sauce can be stored in the fridge for at least three days and it freezes very well. When you first blend the sauce. it will be quite thick. This is the best time to portion it out and freeze it.

How do you make Indian food taste like a restaurant?

These are:
  • base gravy (mostly onions, plus carrots, peppers, cabbage, garlic, spices, oil, (I forget the whole list)). ...
  • Ginger-garlic paste.
  • Mixed powder (kind of like home made garam masala)
  • Spiced oil (optional)
  • spiced tomato sauce (optional IMO).
  • Variety of maybe 8-10 common Indian spices.




  • HOW TO MAKE BASE GRAVY - BIR - INDIAN RESTAURANT STYLE - SIMPLIFIED RECIPE TO FOLLOW




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