BIR - British Indian restaurant food

I wanted not only to learn how to cook Indian food correctly, but also really get to know how all those spices and other ingredients worked together. I wanted to be able to put the cookbooks away and develop my own Indian recipes."

Dan Toombs/The Curry Guy

Time for the next blog on my list. A journey for the man above - The Curry Guy from California to the North of England and eventually to India - the last not permanently.

His name is Dan Toombs and in 1993 he left California for England. I have not been able to find out why, but assume it was work, which at the time was PR. He had always loved cooking, and in America had become a massive fan of Mexican food - very popular in California of course. So when he came to England - with wife and three children in tow - and was first taken to a standard British Indian restaurant he was blown away by the taste, and set out to learn how to cook Indian food. He bought all the books he could find on Indian food - Madhur Jaffrey et al. I assume but pretty soon realised that the 'authentic' Indian food that he was cooking from these books, although great, was not - to him - as great as the Indian food he ate in Indian restaurants. And so he set out to find why they were different.

Well it's all in the sauce - Base curry sauce:

"With more and more people going out for a curry after the pub, restaurateurs needed to develop a way of serving people quickly and cheaply. They tailored recipes to the British taste cooking meat off the bone and using a lot of sauce. They developed a base curry sauce which was used in almost every curry from mild korma to the spiciest phaal. These recipes were passed down from chef to chef which helped standardize the recipes. This is why if you order a chicken korma in Edinburgh or London, you have a good idea what your curry will look and taste like." Dan Toombs/Boiled Words

I'm pretty sure that most of us love Indian restaurants - at least those of us from Britain, although they are now a feature of every suburban hub here in Australia too. And I'm sure the concept of the base sauce is also true for here as well. One wonders whether Indian restaurants in India do the same thing. Still it's a little odd to find a blog that is almost exclusively dedicated to BIR - British Indian Restaurant food is it not? Give the people what they want?

And you would have to say that all of his dishes look great. These are his top ten restaurant style dishes.

"The base sauce is meant to be a bit bland. It's a base! It should not have a lot of flavour because the idea is to build on the subtle flavours that are in it." Dan Toombs/TheCurry Guy

I do remember some delicious Indian food that I ate in actual India, on our disaster strewn initial flight to Australia. Our plane broke down in Delhi. In total we were there for 36 hours, but it took several hours before they finally shipped us to a grand hotel - the legacy of the Indian Raj - where the corridors were lined with bowing servants. The restaurant however, served really bad British food. So bad I refused to go down for one meal. But David did and came back rhapsodising about the Indian food he had had when he asked if Indian food was available. So I went down too and yes it was wonderful. This was more than half a century ago, so I can't really remember what I had - or indeed whether it was any better than what I have ate in favourite Indian restaurants, both before and since then. It really is strange, however, to see a blog that favours the partially pre-cooked, and potentially 'all the same' food from British Indian restaurants. It does make one wonder whether the two styles produce similar results.

Dan Toombs began his blog in 2010 and since then has published ten cookbooks - and is now branching into Thai and other South East Asian dishes. And of course there is now Facebook as well.

Initially, I think, he was fairly 'authentic', but the fundamental love, is still, I feel, for the inauthentic.

"About two years into writing my blog, followers started to ask the same questions I had: how do you recreate curry house style food?  I was travelling a lot at the time with my job and started talking my way into the kitchens of curry houses around the country.  My blog and focus took a new direction and I started focusing on getting ‘that’ curry house flavour." Dan Toombs

An example - Chicken korma - a standard Indian restaurant dish. On the left below his restaurant style version which uses pre-fried chicken and the base curry sauce and on the right the 'authentic' version which is created as one would normally cook an Indian dish - fry onions, garlic, ginger, add spices, add chicken and liquid - yoghurt in this case I think and cook until done. But you can tell that he doesn't really like doing it this way. And he does encourage you to experiment:

"So why not make your chicken korma exactly as you want it? Add more sugar than suggested in the recipe below to taste if you want. Add more ground almonds for a nuttier flavour. Do you prefer more cream? Go for it."

To almost conclude a trio of sample recipes from his website: Air fryer bhuna - he's now very much into air fryer curries; Beef shish kabobs; and an interesting Barbecued butter chicken which actually produces chicken tikka along the way.

I'll end with dosas - Indian pancakes, which probably deserve a post all of their own one day. In one interview he stated that this was a recipe dear to his heart because it had taken him a long time to perfect them - a sentiment with which Felicity Cloake who had a go at Perfect Dosas, would concur.

"Full disclosure: these are a bit of a labour of love to prepare from scratch, which is why they make such perfect street food, but they’re also so good even when they’re bad, that I’m confident you won’t regret it." Felicity Cloake

He now has a few different recipes for them but the Masala dosas are his favourite. In India it's street food extraordinaire, but you'd have to say that his look pretty good - as do Felicity's (above).

This man is obviously obsessed. When he first fell in love with Indian restaurant food and decided to master the art of cooking Indian food, he made his family eat exclusively Indian food at all meals - breakfast, lunch and dinner for a year - one website said two - and they still eat it two or three times a week. He did admit that he suspects his three children might have cheated a bit, but can you imagine trying that on your own family? And ten cookbooks! But I have to say that just about all of his recipes - illustrated with step by step photographs - look pretty good.

YEARS GONE BY

May 5

2024 - Nothing

2023 - A book and a cook - coincidentally a book on Indian food by Meera Sodha

2022 - Aspic - a first recipe and surely a dead one?

2021 - Roast dinners

2020 - Deleted

2019 - Nothing

2018 - Something new and strange - Buddha's hands

2017 - Whatever happened to the Cordon Bleu?