Is that just to make it more sticky, or does it have marinating properties too?
jjimm - Please send a package of your friend Jasvinder’s mum’s secret recipe garam masala ASAP for verification purposes.
WordMan - At the Indian restaurants in my city, the CTM always has some cream content. If yogurt is being used, it is a full cream one, or some amount of cream is added in addition to the yogurt.
Has nothing to do with “stickiness”.
When yogurt is heated, it tends to separate and make a bit of a curdled mess.
Happens in marinades too.
The addition of cornstarch prevents it from separating.
Do try it if you are cooking with yogurt - especially if it is added to hot liquids at the end of the recipe as in Kormas and other Indian dishes.
I should add that it is not enough to act as a thickening agent as flour/cornstarch to a gravy. That is not the purpose. It is just a little touch to stop the yogurt from separating into nasty looking curds and does not alter the taste at all.
[quote=“needscoffee, post:22, topic:524497”]
jjimm - Please send a package of your friend Jasvinder’s mum’s secret recipe garam masala ASAP for verification purposes.
Penzy’s Garam Masala is pretty good and you can doctor from there
Unfortunately it only came back with her from Delhi last week, and I had to beg her to give me a couple of spoonfuls of it in a jar. She was very reluctant. I also asked her for the recipe, but she said you can’t get most of the stuff here, and she doesn’t know the English names for some of the spices, which she and her mum bought fresh in a market, then toasted and crushed up themselves, and only her mum knows the proportions. I have to say, it’s incredibly fresh tasting and much more zingy than the garam masala you buy in shops.
But now I’ve used it all up. 
This all sounds wonderful - thank you in the name of science, jjimm!
King Bobo and **needscoffee **- okay; got it.
I don’t know how authentic it is, but you can make your own “greek yogurt” from plain yogurt. I learned it from Alton Brown’s Big Fat Greek Sandwich episode, and it’s pretty simple. You basically strain the plain everyday yogurt for a couple hours. Viola.
Here’s an exerpt from his tzatziki sauce recipe:
16 ounces plain yogurt
Place the yogurt in a tea towel, gather up the edges, suspend over a bowl, and drain for 2 hours in the refrigerator.
I put a “tea towel” (I use a clean shop cloth) over a container with the edges hanging over and secure it on with a bungee strap around the outside, being sure there is room below the suspended cloth for the extra liquid to pool in the bowl. Then dump the yogurt on top of the cloth. Lid up, wait two or three hours or overnight and you’re done.
I don’t have any ideas about your recipe, but you can get away without shopping for specialty yogurt, which can be important for those of us who live a little more rural.
Dead Flowers, Our cook in India always makes yogurt from fresh milk and then strains the yogurt to thicken it and then adds approx. a tsp per cup of “maida” (=flour in India, but more similar to corn starch) to stabilize it.
He cooks from it every type of dish and it NEVER separates into curd and I have seen him BOIL stuff with yogurt included. Try that with commercial North American yogurts, strained or not.
The addition of a little starch just adds to the finished product. No deletion of taste but a great addition to texture.
Do a little experiment. Make some sort of gravy or sauce. Then add raw yogurt and heat/boil on high heat. Repeat with “treated” yogurt (i.e. with a touch of starch). Then tell me which result you prefer.
I am just passing on a tip I learned in S. India where they use yogurt almost daily.
I promise you, if you follow this tip you will thank me.
KB.
YMMV.
King Bobo, this sounds like an awesome trick. Too many times when I order takeaway curries and get them home, the sauce has “split” into a disgusting mess. I’m hoping that the addition of maida in future will prevent such an occurrence with my own cooking.
Jimm,
Cannot say it will help your takeaways, but I can surely say it will help the yogurt dishes you do at home.
Now, however, if you are close with the cooks in the takeaway places - do pass along the tip and then maybe your takeouts will improve to no end.
Seriously, this is such a mainstay in South Indian cooking, I do not know why it seems so alien.
People; do try this.
Interested in learning something new, I checked out the Ramsay recipe and jjimm’s and I was baffled by “curry leaves.” Curry is a mixture of other spices. I have never heard of curry leaves.
Also, at the nearby market, I can buy any of about 50 different curries - Arabian, Red, Green, Bombay, Thai, etc.etc. But the recipes I see that require curry usually do not specify a particular one. How do I choose which to use? (My goal is to try them all. I’m going alphabetically.)
I agree. I’ve never seen a recipe call for curry leaves, but apparently they exist.
Choose the one that is appropriate to the region whose food you’re making. The differences between curries can be vast. For example Thai curry (like Red Curry, Green Curry, Yellow Curry, Panang, etc.) always come in pastes, and is generally prepared from fresh ingredients like chiles, lemongrass, shrimp paste, cilantro root, garlic, shallots, and kaffir lime leaves. Indian curry powders and pastes tend to be mostly composed of dry, toasted ground spices, like coriander seed, cumin, turmeric, mustard seeds, ginger, fenugreek, etc. For Indian recipes, I would either make my own curry powder, or buy a brand of paste (like Patak’s) that I like. They have a number of pastes, but the most generic two are simply called “Curry Paste, Mild” and “Curry Paste, Hot.”