Rama's look/taste alike?

Jadie,

+1 what MsCheeky said.

IMO to replicate any Rama’s meal, Google the desired recipe and triple the ghee. Make sure you use plenty of coconut cream for the gravy (the highest fat content you can find). Ignore any amount of hot spice mentioned in the recipe and add chilli powder to your liking (no other hot spice is necessary). Do not add any vegetables if at all possible – Indians live mostly on meat.

In all seriousness, tastiness comes from freshly grinding your own spices in a mortar and pestle if you can get them whole. Curry blends lose their flavour over time and you often don’t know what’s in them. If you can’t buy fresh curry leaves, you may have to grow a curry tree.

Good luck; you are going through exactly what I went through when I moved from Sydney.

Best. Indian. Ever.
Minnie and her team rock!

Sorry – the book is actually called ‘Favourite Restaurant Curries‘, not Recipes.

See if you can get hold of Pat Chapman’s Curry Club Favourite Restaurant Recipes – you can pick it up for a pound from Amazon.uk. The guy visited pretty much every restaurant on Manchester’s ‘Curry Mile’ and found that not only do they all cook curry in exactly the same way, pretty much every restaurant curry is the same dish, with variations in spicing occurring in a hot pan at the last minute.

According to the book, the secrets to Indian restaurant curry are:

– massive quantities of onion, garlic and ginger puree. The stuff simmers in enormous pots like apple sauce, and forms the thick base of almost all curries;
– cheap cuts of meat (eg shoulder), simmered for hours in akhni – a very weak stock; and
– lots of ghee.

The dish can be ready within a couple of minutes of you ordering, because all the hard yakka was done hours earlier. The chef throws a pan on very high heat. In goes a generous ladle of onion/garlic/ginger puree and a little akhni stock, followed by whatever spices are called for (usually kept premixed in tubs – so for a ‘Madras’, throw in a couple of spoons of Madras powder or paste). Another minute, in goes the meat that has been simmering all day, boned, diced and returned to the akhni stock. Add the finishing touches eg cream, coconut milk, tomato paste, then a healthy dollop ghee. Finished.

I’ve always spread a Rama’s takeaway meal over two days in the belief it was even tastier the next day.
So extra salt and oil, eh?
I still think there’s more going on to produce such a unique and delicious taste.
Hi Minny, if you get to see this thread. Love your work.

Part of the secret to Ramas food, like much restaurant food, as they use more oil and salt than you generally would at home. If you’ve ever put your Ramas leftovers in the fridge overnight and seen the level of fat on top the next day, you’ll know what I mean.

As for making food that tastes like Ramas, don’t forget that there is Fijian influence to the food – it is fijian indian. Now, I think google is your friend.

You could also get your Canberra friends to bring supplies from Rama’s when they visit you.

Actually a bit of googling has come up trumps. The one I (and when I say I, I mean the person that cooks my food) uses is “A Little Taste of India” http://www.murdochbooks.com.au/tasteindia.htm and it has a saffron spine, not the whole cover.

YouWhat said :

We know Minny (the owner/operator of Rama’s) – no way she’d give out her recipes (!) but I’ll see if she knows of any place down your way that she might recommend; maybe that would be an acceptable substitute!

Thanks YouWhat, that would be great. You could tell her we are the Chicken Korma and Beef Madras people and that our boys have all driven for her – she’ll know who we are 🙂

A good cookbook is the best I can do- everyone has difference definitions of “good” and I can’t recall the name of the one on my kitchen bench except to say that it has a saffron cover and loads of helpful photos.