The Curry Guy’s top tips for making your best curry yet

You really can’t go wrong with a curry. Warming, filling and tasty, they’re the perfect meal for this time of year.

But you don’t have to spend all your money on a takeaway to have a delicious curry at home – just ask Dan Toombs, AKA the Curry Guy.

Toombs, 60, is obsessed with bringing curries to the masses, and is releasing his 11th cookbook, The Curry Guy Slow Cooker.

After moving from California in 1993, Toombs fell in love with the British curry scene, later begging his way into restaurants to learn the secrets of the perfect dish. Now based near York, Toombs knows a thing or two about taking your curry to the next level…

Nail the base

The main thing Toombs learned from his time in curry house kitchens? It’s all about the base.

“There’s a base sauce” for pretty much every curry that’s made, he says. “It’s quite a bland sauce, similar to chicken stock or vegetable stock.

“When it’s not seasoned, you have this bland stock that you add to almost every curry, and the magic happens when it hits the pan, because you have different spices to make the different curries.”

So if you get this base sauce down – and it’s “quite simple to make”, according to Toombs – you’re golden. “It’s the secret behind how to make real curry house-style foods. It’s not something they do very much in India, it’s really a British thing.”

This base sauce is basically “an onion stock – a lot of places will put other vegetables in it, like cabbage and green pepper, but nothing that has bite to it”, and from there you can create pretty much any curry you like.

Go off-piste

While recipes are a useful guide, Toombs warns against getting too hung up on them.

“A lot of people concentrate too much on the recipe rather than what they personally enjoy,” he explains. So if you like quite a saucy curry, add more stock when you’re cooking, or if you enjoy spice, then pump up the chillies.

He recommends “trying things as you go, especially if you’re trying to teach yourself how to cook” so you can “begin to know what the different spices taste like” and will know how to adjust your dish accordingly.

It’s all about trial and error: “You’ll get the idea behind it, and you can make up your own recipes once you know how to use that base sauce.”

Dig out your slow cooker

If you have a slow cooker, it could be the secret to more flavourful curries with a whole lot less effort.

“What you do get from a slow cooker is a more intense flavour, because you’re not trying to rush things,” Toombs says. “You’re letting all those ingredients melt together.”

Plus, it’s a lot easier than slaving over a hot stove. “The thing I like about slow cookers is you really can set them and forget them, so you can go to work and know there’s not going to be any kind of issues. You’re not going to burn anything to the bottom of the pan or anything like that.”

Toombs recommends trying his recipe for lamb nihari in the slow cooker. “It’s a northern Indian/Pakistani dish which is traditionally cooked over a low heat and simmered for about three or four hours, so it’s perfect for a slow cooker,” he explains.

“You can put it in a slow cooker on high for about four hours, or if you go to work and put the meat in there – which is normally lamb shanks – just let it become really tender for eight hours [on the low setting].”

There’s another benefit to trying your next curry in the slow cooker, with Toombs saying it transforms some of the cheaper cuts of meats into the best dishes, saving you a bit of money along the way.

“A lot of times the cheap cuts have the most flavour – the reason why they’re cheap is because they take so long to cook. But if you’re putting it in the slow cooker, it doesn’t make any difference. You let it sit there and simmer until it’s cooked through and really tender, and you get a better flavoured meat and it’s a lot less expensive.”

Prep your own spice blends and pastes

Toombs’ top tip is to make your own spice blends and pastes at home. While it might require a bit of labour to start with, once you’ve got them sorted you’ll be able to make the most delicious curries – saving you time and money.

Toombs suggests that ground spices that have been sitting on the supermarket shelf for a while might not be “their best”. So if you buy fresh, whole spices, “You can toast them, you can make them taste better than just adding them in their ground form… It’s something you can just throw into a curry and you know it’s going to taste good.”

The same goes for spice pastes – and Toombs has recipes for Rogan Josh and tikka masala pastes and more in his new book. Once you’ve whipped them up, he recommends storing them in a preserve jar with an airtight lid, topping them up with oil so the flavour stays fresh.

“Spices, once they’re ground, start to lose their flavour. But by making these pastes and covering them with oil, you’re giving them a longer life,” he says. “I use them all the time.”

Try something new

From a jalfrezi to a Madras, there are the classic curries we all know and love. But if you really want to take things up a notch, Toombs recommends trying something new – like his recipe for a Sri Lankan black chicken curry.

“Unlike in India, where they don’t really use curry powders that much – they’ll use different spices, like garam masala. But in Sri Lanka, they use curry powders quite a lot,” he says.

“Curry powder is a lot of warming spices that can also have chillies in it… And the black chicken curry is one I learned when I was over in Sri Lanka, it’s one of my favourites. You roast the curry powder until it’s almost black – it’s like chocolatey brown, and that gives it a really intense flavour. I haven’t seen it in any other curries from other parts of the world, it’s something very Sri Lankan, and if you’re looking for something unique, that’s what you have to try.”

Curry Guy Slow Cooker by Dan Toombs is published by Quadrille, priced £16.99. Photography by Kris Kirkham. Available now.