The Curry Secret: How to Cook Real Indian Restaurant Meals at Home

I've tried a lot of Indian recipes, but these are the best-tasting, most "restaurant quality" recipes I've tried. They are labor intensive on the front end - there's a lot of prep required. But, if you have the time and energy to spend a few hours once a month on making the "master sauce," you'll have very easy and tasty meals that are very quick to prepare, right from your freezer.

If you love Indian Curry you simply must get this book, its small but full of authentic UK Indian Resturant recipes. The first thing was the book arrived from the UK 5 weeks before it was supposed to. I guess Amazon dont realize that small parcels get here within 5 business days. Fantastic service, beating a book sent from Vegas by 2 days !!!The book is full of recipes that i remember from growing up in the UK with an Indian restaurant in every town sometimes more. My favorite was the "Taste of Raj" on the Upper Richmond Road just outside of Richmond Surry. Their Chicken Jalfrazi was the best i ever tasted. I cooked the Jalfrazi from "The Curry Secret" and it tastes very similar to how i remember it in the UK.I also purchased "The New Curry Secret" which has all new recipes and is full of inspiring pictures (which the original sadly lacks) I am looking forward to cooking more of these dishes over the coming weeks and months. Now all i need is some warm beer LOL

I'm a big Indian food fan and there's some great recipes in this book! Techniques for how to create the base used in many curries are depicted well. It's a simple read, which is great when you just want to get the cooking job done. The only thing I would say about the base technique is that you need to be organised and you'd either want plenty of freezer space to store the base or be eating a lot of Indian food to make use of the base recipe effectively. But for the price I'd recommend it to any home chef.

Since moving to Australia I have missed the great "British" curry. I read the reviews of this (both 5 star and 1 star) and decided to take the plunge as it was only $7 on the Kindle. Best $7 spent I tell you.To me, the curries taste like the ones I used to get at the takeaway I kid you not. I made the sauce exactly according to the book from stage 1 which looks like snot to stage 3 which looks bland. However, persevere and use the spices and herbs recommended and you will end up with a great takeaway version of curry.The onion chutney and mint yoghurt are exactly what you get in the shops and I put all the naan ingredients in the breadmaker and cook them on the BBQ hotplate and get fabulous results.I know opinions on this book are split and I was genuinely concerned making the sauce which looks awful recalling on the one star reviews but I am delighted with the results as are my entire family. Saturday nights are curry nights once again!I have taken authentic Indian cookery classes and agree the curries are not the same as those but if you hanker after British takeaway curry you will not be disappointed.

Kriss Dhillon's The Curry Secret is a small, but effective, book detailing a system for producing numerous Indian curries quickly. Really, the book is about ONE recipe, the base sauce, and all the combinations using that recipe as an ingredient. The book also includes recipes for side dishes, which I haven't tried, having favorite recipes for similar dishes from other cookbooks.Dhillon's curry system allows cooks to prepare a week's worth of dinners in an hour or so in the weekend. The cook can prepare the sauce, get the meat (for carnivores) ready and freeze, make a large quantity of a delicious rice dish (rice holds beautifully in the refrigerator), and perhaps make another side dish (dals, Mulligitawny soup, and samosas are favorites that store well). With these dishes, the cook can finish off a fresh curry for the day while warming the side dishes. Thus, the cook can have an exquisite meal ready in about fifteen minutes.

This low budget cook book is really worth the pennies.There are loads of recipes which are really good. Although I'm a professional chef I don't really have that much of an experience on cooking Indian food.Recipies are very simple and straight forward.I would suggest this one to each and every one out there.This is not a coffee table book but is something you want to cook from over and over again.And actually I've bought it twice. Lost the first one and had to order it from Amazon again.

If you want to make genuine British curry, this is the book for you. The directions are simple, but not intuitive. When I read the directions on making the curry sauce that is the base for most meals, I thought "this can't be right, where are the spices ?". Just ignore your personal feelings, just follow the directions, and you will end up eating something very close to the curry you could buy in any town in the UK.

A British friend of ours runs a small cafe and his curries are so good. I found out the secret was this little book so I bought it! It gives you a recipe for a Curry Base Sauce and then Individual Curry recipes where you add different spices or vegetables to the base sauce to create very different tasting curries. You can make a large amount of the curry base and keep it on hand to create delicious curries whenever the mood strikes. I'm a vegetarian and love the Okra Curry, Red Lentil Dahl and Potato Chickpea Curry. Friends who eat meat rave about the Chicken Curry. Ingredients are pretty simple to find. There are lots of other Indian Recipes in the book that I haven't tried..

I love Curries and Since moving to France - I have missed a good curry. So this book has been my Bible in making curries and especially Naan'sExcellent Little book x

Buen libro y excelente atención del vendedor.

Wanted to learn how to make many different types of curry and base gravey.

I had this book many years ago but mislaid it, decided to buy it again as I need a good curry

I did find it difficult to understand some of the negative reviews, since this book doesn't claim to create authentic Indian cooking. Ok, so it says 'Real Indian Restaurant Meals ...', but then I'm sure we all have plenty of Indian restaurants in our area (who doesn't these days?), and they don't all taste the same, so it's a bit hopeful to expect that this book will produce curries just like your local favourite.The simple fact is that I can cook curries, including authentic Indian ones, but I do like the taste and simplicity of 'The Curry Secret' curries too. If you think they don't taste of much, are you using the full amount of oil and salt specified? If you think the quantaties of these are excessive, you'd probably be better off buying a healthy eating cookery book, but it's the only explanation I have for those who claim the recipes don't have much flavour.I've seen some criticisms that the sauce is too watery. I can understand this, but then I don't use excessive quantities of the sauce, and if I want more and thicker sauce I tend to do the Dhansak which uses a portion of the Dhal recipe in the book, or the Tikka Masala which increases sauce volume by the addition of cream. Both are well worth doing, and on one occasion I had a guest who pronounced the Chicken Tikka Masala as one of the best she'd ever had. Note that for simplicity I use a proprietary Tikka Masala spice blend and not that given in the book.My young children love these curries, although for obvious reasons I completely tone down the use of chilli (powder and fresh). I get around this for my own tastes by adding some whole chillis a few minutes before the end of cooking, which softens them so I can take slices off to suit. Keeping the chillis whole prevents the dish from 'heating up' too much.To enable a curry to be 'knocked up' in a few minutes, prepare plenty of the sauce in advance (as described in the book - this gives you enough for about 7 curries), prepare the meat in advance earlier in the day (as described in the book), and put the curry together a few minutes before you want to eat. I find that if I do that it takes longer to steam some basmati rice than it does to cook the curry. If you fancy the Dhansak (worth the effort) prepare the Dhal while you're cooking the meat.The only downside is, as mentioned elsewhere, the smell when making the sauce. In fact my wife banishes me to the garage where I can be found some Saturday mornings sitting on a wooden box with my camping stove and a pot of boiling curry sauce.So to summarise, if you want the real deal super special curry your expensive local restaurant dishes up, get a takeaway from there. If you want an authentic curry, well this doesn't pretend to give you that. But if you want something that is tasty and quick, this is just the job.