The Curry Guy: Recreate Over 100 of the Best British Indian Restaurant Recipes at Home
£12.20£16.10 (-24%)
Dan Toombs (aka The Curry Guy) has perfected the art of replicating British Indian Restaurant (BIR) cooking after travelling around the UK, sampling dishes, learning the curry house kitchen secrets and refining those recipes at home.
In other words, Dan makes homemade curries that taste just like a takeaway from your favourite local but in less time and for less money. Dan has learnt through the comments left on his blog and social media feeds that people are terribly let down when they make a chicken korma or a prawn bhuna from other cookbooks and it taste nothing like the dish they experience when they visit a curry house… but they thank him for getting it right.
The Curry Guy shows all BIR food lovers around the world how to make their favourite dishes at home. Each of the classic curry sauces are given, including tikka masala, korma, dopiazza, pasanda, madras, dhansak, rogan josh, vindaloo, karai, jalfrezi, bhuna and keema.
Popular vegetable and sides dishes are there as accompaniments, aloo gobi, saag aloo and tarka dhal, plus samosas, pakoras, bhaji, and pickles, chutneys and raitas. Of course, no curry is complete without rice or naan. Dan shows you how to cook perfect pilau rice or soft pillowy naan every time.
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Additional information
| Publisher | Quadrille Publishing Ltd, 1st edition (4 May 2017) |
|---|---|
| Language | English |
| Hardcover | 160 pages |
| ISBN-10 | 1849499411 |
| ISBN-13 | 978-1849499415 |
| Dimensions | 18.3 x 2 x 23 cm |
by James Clark
This book has some fantastic recipes. You’ll need to purchase quite a few items to start with. But once you have a collection they seem to last for quite a few meals. It guides through making a base sauce and I use the chicken tikka in most of my dishes, but there’s a real variety of dishes. Fantastic book which I would highly recommend to the curry enthusiasts out there.
by Mick
We like the story behind making a curry rather than just the recipe.
by Adam Craig
Follow these recipes to get authentic Indian Restaurant dishes at home. These use a base sauce, which takes some time, but delivers a restaurant style dish at home, very cheaply.
by claire
Love this book
by Yicker
It’s all in the prep.
When you first buy this book, don’t expect to be eating curry that night!
In a clear and engaging way, The Curry Guy shows you how to make your own spice blends, then how to use these to make other preparations, then how to make your base sauce and (very importantly) to skim off your oil to use later.
Free up some freezer space, expect to be buying large quantities of spices, and buy yourself some storage tubs. Then get making!!
When you’ve spent a couple of days doing all the prep and filled both your cupboards and freezer full of prepared products, you’ll then suddenly be able to knock up restaurant / takeaway quality food in about 15 minutes! Imagine a different curry every week for the next 12 weeks and every one as good as your local restaurant.
This is a good book, but you need to be serious about it to do it right.
by E. L. Wisty
There’s an awful lot of snobbery around British Indian Restaurant (BIR) food these days. In any group of diners in a BIR there is always one bore who has to come out with the line “real Indian food is nothing like this”. Yes, we KNOW, thanks. But it’s a style of food all of its own, and yes, even though there is a mass-produced element to it with the use of base sauces and spice blends common to most dishes, it’s a popular style.
For many years I have had some cookbooks by Pat Chapman who wrote a number of cookbooks based around this BIR style with common sauces and spice blends, but those small paperbacks are getting a bit faded, dirty and dog-eared now and apart from anything else could do with a bit of an update – even BIR food is not necessarily quite the same as it was 20 years ago and there are dishes on menus nowadays which weren’t seen back then. Virtually all Indian cookbooks these days fall into the snobbish camp, promising to show us the REAL India. Nothing wrong with that, and I have plenty of such cookbooks myself, but there seems to have been a dearth of BIR-style books, so this is most welcome.
By its very nature with the use of aforesaid base sauces and spice blends, there can be a considerable amount of work to be done before beginning, and you would have to be something of a regular curry eater as a result of the quantities made. (Yes, you could make smaller quantities, but if doing these sauces you may as well make a batch load while you’re doing it and stick in the freezer.)
My only complaint is that something could have been said about doing vegetarian versions of the main dishes – I’m not vegetarian but trying to cut down on meat consumption – OK it’s not beyond the wit of man to improvise here but some suggestions about vegetables to use and their preparation wouldn’t have gone amiss (beyond the one recipe for fried peppers which is intended as an additional element for some of the meat dishes).
by martino
This book will faithfully allow you to produce a wide range of British Indian restaurant curries and, in time, give you a far better understanding of the sometimes bewildering mix of spices and what they contribute. I’ve been using it for four years so far and have had so much fun in working my way through almost all the many different recipes. However, in using it, you need to do the leg work. This is not a quick curry book but with initial solid preparation you can then quickly make a range of curries from your stock of base curry sauces and pre-made spice mixes. To find the correct balance, I would suggest that you have to make your own base curry sauces and the spice oil that you drain off it (it’s brilliant)- there is no way round this but it’s just like making a vat of soup so not a problem. Make enough and freeze it in portions. Also use the mixed spice recipe, but life can be made simpler just by using passata instead of the misleadingly named tomato purée recipe (not like tomato purée in a tube which is far too strong) which is in many of the curries. Also be sure to source frozen garlic and ginger instead of making it fresh all the time which is frankly gruelling in my opinion. The frozen is very good but the stuff in a jar will not do as it has far too much vinegar in it and will ruin your curries. Once you get going, you won’t stop and your family will be pestering you for their favourite curries till you can make them with your eyes closed. Be sure to find a good Asian grocery as it will save you a fortune in spices and is probably the place to get the frozen garlic and ginger. A great book and a big thanks to Dan Toombs who has done a great service to the home cooking of curries! His Naan recipe is also great btw.