This is another of Toombs' recipes, that was nonetheless made with the Edwards base. I need to get the flavour of Toombs' balti masala before the flavour of the spices wilts. This was made with some shamelessly packaged supermarket king prawns. The amount's doubled from Toombs' online recipe; this dish also uses some ghee, which I prepared earlier. It's always good to have a nice slab of ghee on hand.
The resulting dish was somewhat "non-BIR" tasting, having more of an East Asian feel to it. This may be only because of my personal associations, though; we never had seafood curries in my household as a child, nor did I ever order king prawn at the local takeaway, despite that exalted status of prawn dishes in the typical UK restaurant.
The flavour is sour, tomatoey and very saucy. Being aware of the tendency of Toombs' Balti recipes to verge on the excessively sour, I drastically cut down the amount of vinegar and lemon present in this dish. It's still plenty sour enough, even with halving those amounts. The peppers don't get very cooked in this recipe, so they remain crunchy, as do the prawns, which contributes to the stir-fry feel. I like Dhillon's method of a deep-fried scorched pepper, which I didn't apply here.
Mixing up the balti masala into a vinegary paste.
Some beautiful looking ghee, and funky red peppers.
Proceeding from the concentrated base sauce to a spiced activated sauce.
Adding in the prawns to be quickly cooked. I probably ended up cooking them for a bit too long.
This is sometimes really nice but most of the time is just too sour. I get the strange idea that this could have been enhanced massively by adding paneer to the recipe, which would mitigate some of the sourness. Also, after reading Pat Chapman's "Balti Bible" (on which more soon), I get the idea that Toombs' instruction to 'activate' the balti masala using 125ml of vinegar is a large overexaggeration. Using Chapman's balti masala, he instructs to use just enough to form a sludge that can drip off the spoon.