Reddit mentions of The Secret to That Takeaway Curry Taste

Generally, recipes in Western cookbooks and food blogs are watered-down versions of Indian food -- maybe that's your problem?

I've seen recipes for tikka masala that ask for a single onion, just a few teaspoons each of powdered spices, and no mention of ginger-garlic paste or essential things like fenugreek leaves, curry leaves, desiccated coconut or ghee, and rarely any mention of blooming spices (frying them in oil/ghee to release their aromatic oils).

Then they ask you to throw in a whole can of tomatoes and sometimes even water. Of course it will be flavourless.

Look into cookbooks that tell you how to make a base gravy (a highly concentrated, finely blended onion/pepper mixture that often uses things like cabbage and carrots, and acts as a flavour enhancer and thickener), how to make your own garam masala, how to make your own ginger-garlic paste etc.

The best book I've encountered for this is The Secret to That Takeaway Curry Taste. It's a somewhat ramshackle e-book, but it's written by a working chef who runs a small British-Indian takeaway restaurant, and the techniques are exactly right.

The base gravy is similar to the mother sauces in French cooking. With the base gravy you can make a lot of different dishes. They typically start with blooming some spices in ghee or mustard oil, adding meat or vegetables, then adding the gravy and other flavour elements like yogurt and coconut, and then cooking this in the sauce. For even more concentrated flavour, consider making the sauce separate from the protein, then blending the sauce until it's velvety smooth. Marinate and cook protein separately (e.g. chicken pieces or paneer on skewers), then add to the sauce.

I think you mean "definitive".

https://www.amazon.com/Secret-That-Takeaway-Curry-Taste-ebook/dp/B008N2B0OC

So a few people have recommended this book to you: http://www.amazon.com/Secret-That-Takeway-Curry-Taste-ebook/dp/B008N2B0OC

Well, you're in luck, because I've found a couple of videos on Youtube made by the author of that book that explain how to make Tikka Masala.

Here's the video showing how to make the sauce: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yLfhMF2WaZw

And here is the video showing how to cook the dish: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n1wjyOdNdSw

Got one Asian store and one Indian resto in this burg. The store's pretty good, and the resto survives because -- only one in town.

Here's what I did:

Shop online, and learn how to make a base gravy like THIS BLOKE does and take it from there into the higher orders of Indian cooking. It's BIR, not Mumbai, but you take what you can get and BIR ain't exactly chump change for Small Town, USA.

You can order just about any of the basics for Indian cooking, and cooking appliances (karai for example), online.

Indians are fantastic at blogging and putting up YouTube videos; there's a real opportunity to learn from that as opposed to when this older Redditor was expanding horizons.

The online purchases won't be cheap, but when you have a craving for quality food, you have the budget to get it.

This ebook would be fantastic!

How many dogs do you have? I'm currently a 3 dog household and its been rough! Still trying to get them all to get along.

Pooper Scooper

I decided to buy it because it was $4 on Amazon the 2nd book is $3

http://www.amazon.com/Secret-That-Takeaway-Curry-Taste-ebook/dp/B008N2B0OC?ie=UTF8&psc=1&redirect=true&ref_=oh_aui_d_detailpage_o00_