Base sauce in 10 minutes with no work!
No drying of vegetables required to make this base sauce! You can also purchase vegetable powders!
So I’m sitting at my son’s flat waiting for him to get in from classes in York where he studies. I’m feeling a bit peckish but as usual, he has nothing in the cupboards other than some instant vegetable soup. Where does all that money go? I open a cold beer from the fridge and heat up some water to pour over the dried ingredients from the soup pack.
The soup is actually a lot better than I thought it would be and suddenly it dawns on me, I should try doing the same with my curry house base sauce recipe. Could it actually be made in ten minute?
When I returned home, I took my dusty vegetable and fruit drier out of the attic and cleaned it up. If my idea worked, I knew that I could use home dried ingredients or purchase vegetable powders just like those that were in that vegetable soup I tried.
Could I actually make a base sauce in ten minutes that tasted as good as those I had been labouring on for years?
Dry your veggies or just purchase dried flakes or powders
I didn’t have all the ingredients on hand that I would usually use in a base sauce but I wasn’t going to drive to the shop and purchase them. The red bell pepper and cabbage would have to be for another time if my base sauce idea tasted as good as I was hoping.
I set my vegetable/fruit drier to 67c and set the timer for 12 hours and then just let it do its job. I use this one which I can highly recommend! Note: I have since used vegetable powders with excellent results. The great thing about using powders is that you don’t have to blend the sauce afterwards. It’s ready to go!
I weighed out the vegetables using my normal base sauce recipe but halved it. With dried vegetable ready, I weighed them again so I would know how much powder to use in future.
This recipe makes about three litres of base sauce or about enough for 4 curry house style curries that serve 4. You can scale it up or down depending on how much you want to make. The results were fantastic. In fact I couldn’t tell the difference. Base sauce in 10 minutes! You need to give this a try!
Dried veggies ready for my base sauce experiment.
I covered the dried veggies with 2 litres of boiling water and add the spices.
I covered them and let sit for 10 minutes to rehydrate.
Then all I had to do was add another litre of water and blend. Perfect flavour!!
You can make so many different curry house curries with this base sauce. Here are a few from my website but my most up to date recipes are in my cookbooks, ‘The Curry Guy‘ and ‘The Curry Guy Easy‘.
Chicken Tikka Masala
Chicken Korma
Chicken Jalfrezi
Chicken Ceylon
Chicken Dhansak
Chicken Dopiaza
Chicken Chilli Garlic
Chicken Madras
Lamb Rogan Josh
Lamb Vindaloo
Instant Curry House Base Sauce
Ingredients
- 100g dried onion flakes or onion powder
- 15g dried tomatoes or tomato powder
- 7 g dried carrot or carrot powder
- 15g dried garlic or garlic powder
- 7g dried ginger or ginger powder
- 1 1/2 tbsp garam masala
- 1 1/2 tbsp ground cumin
- 1 1/2 tbsp ground coriander
- 1 1/2 tbsp turmeric
- 1 1/2 tbsp sweet paprika
- 1/2 tsp fenugreek powder
- 2 litres boiling water plus one more for thinning
- 3 tbsp rapeseed (canola) oil
Instructions
- Bring two litres of water to a boil. Place the dried ingredients and spices in a large saucepan and pour the boiling water and oil over them. Cover and let stand for 10 minutes to rehydrate. Blend into a smooth sauce. If using vegetable powders, you won't have to do this.
- To finish, add about another litre of water until your sauce is about as runny as full fat milk and use as needed.
Nunu
Saturday 2nd of May 2020
This is a great idea. I've been freezing your low calorie base sauce but I have already been drying some of these vegetables myself for other uses that it would be a good substitute. If someone wanted to mix up the powder in advance and store it in a container, do you know how much would need to be added per liter for a batch?
nunu
Sunday 30th of January 2022
@Dan Toombs, Hi I just wanted to follow up with you on what I did. I used your low-calorie base sauce recipe, but dehydrated the weight of fresh vegetables called for in that recipe (including the cabbage). Once I had collected all the dried vegetables, I ground them up with the spices and stored it in a jar in the pantry. I take 1/4 cup of the powder plus a cup of water to make 300ml of base sauce. I had been freezing the low-calorie base recipe in the freezer before but that took up a lot of room and this is actually easier to just grab off the shelf when I need it.
Dan Toombs
Tuesday 5th of May 2020
Hi Thank you for getting in touch. To be honest, I couldn't tell you at the moment without my calculator. This recipe make 3 litres of just divide it all by three and you should be good to go. :-)