Secret Sauce

Here is the secret to cooking the perfect curry and the base for all of our sauces.
All of recipes use 300ml/half pint amounts of Secret Sauce, so this recipe makes enough for four or five delicious curries.

(Although if you don’t want to follow this recipe, or can’t eat onion or garlic, see below for an alternative method!)

Ingredients:

4-5 medium onions, peeled and quartered (800g approx unpeeled weight)
1 head garlic, peeled (i.e. lots of cloves!)
120g/4oz piece of ginger, chopped into small pieces (peel if you like - we don't bother: as with a lot of things, the flavour is in the skin!)
1 litre water

Recipe:

Place all the ingredients in a pan, bring to the boil and simmer until the onion is soft and translucent (about half an hour).
Leave to cool, then blend till smooth. You will have about 1.2 litres or a little more.
You can leave this sitting around on the stove-top for a day, then it will last for about a week in the fridge, so you can make it a couple of days before you start cooking the actual curries.

We find that preparing the above in double or even triple batches in a very large pan makes life even easier. This can be frozen in recipe-sized portions to simplify future curry-making sessions. When defrosting you can just empty it straight in to the pan to let it melt, or let it sit around for a few hours in a bowl if you are organised enough!

If you are suffering from an intolerance to onion (and that must be a terrible cross to bear!), we have found that a turnip is a great substitute. It provides the same colour and texture as onion without any obvious change in flavour. If garlic is a problem, just leave it out and maybe add a little more onion to keep the consistency the same.

NB: * This is the South Asian version. For an authentic South East Asian flavour, substitute galangal and shallots for the ginger and onions!

““Try this method - it really is so easy that you won’t go back to the old ways!”

— Andrew Anderson - founder, Bit spicy

There is a wonderful rubber tube for peeling cloves of garlic that is available from all good cook shops, so you don’t even get smelly hands!

NB. You are very welcome to make a curry without using this technique! You can take the onion, garlic & ginger and blend to a paste. OR, chop an onion finely, fry gently in some oil and add a squirt each of garlic and ginger from a tube. In both cases at some stage in the cooking process add 200ml of water.