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Generally, recipes in Western cookbooks and food blogs are watered-down versions of Indian food -- maybe that's your problem?
I've seen recipes for tikka masala that ask for a single onion, just a few teaspoons each of powdered spices, and no mention of ginger-garlic paste or essential things like fenugreek leaves, curry leaves, desiccated coconut or ghee, and rarely any mention of blooming spices (frying them in oil/ghee to release their aromatic oils).
Then they ask you to throw in a whole can of tomatoes and sometimes even water. Of course it will be flavourless.
Look into cookbooks that tell you how to make a base gravy (a highly concentrated, finely blended onion/pepper mixture that often uses things like cabbage and carrots, and acts as a flavour enhancer and thickener), how to make your own garam masala, how to make your own ginger-garlic paste etc.
The best book I've encountered for this is The Secret to That Takeaway Curry Taste. It's a somewhat ramshackle e-book, but it's written by a working chef who runs a small British-Indian takeaway restaurant, and the techniques are exactly right.
The base gravy is similar to the mother sauces in French cooking. With the base gravy you can make a lot of different dishes. They typically start with blooming some spices in ghee or mustard oil, adding meat or vegetables, then adding the gravy and other flavour elements like yogurt and coconut, and then cooking this in the sauce. For even more concentrated flavour, consider making the sauce separate from the protein, then blending the sauce until it's velvety smooth. Marinate and cook protein separately (e.g. chicken pieces or paneer on skewers), then add to the sauce.
Onions. Lots and lots of onions.
Onions are used a "base gravy" in Indian cooking. Onions are a natural thickener, and will bulk up any sauce.
The basic recipe is: Sweat quartered onions in a mix of water and a neutral oil such as sunflower, optionally together with cabbage, carrots, peppers, ginger, garlic and perhaps some spices. It takes about 45-60 minutes to cook. Then blend said mixture into a fine, concentrated purée.
You use this base gravy a bit like the way mother sauces are used in French cooking, to compose other dishes. The base gravy doesn't taste nice on its own; it's just a thickener and flavour enhancer.
You can add additional thickeners like yoghurt when building the final dish. Done this way, I've never needed cream or a roux or anything else.
The recipe for a base gravy can be found in the book The Secret to That Takeaway Curry Taste. It may look a little amateurish, but the author is a chef at a real Indian curry joint, and the recipes are superb.
Most Western cookbooks neglect a lot of basics. No ginger-garlic paste, no fenugreek leaves, not enough spices, no frying/blooming of spices, no ghee, etc. But probably the most common problem is simply not enough onion.
The best gravy recipe I've found is from The Secret to That Take-Away Curry Taste, which is a book self-published by a British chef who runs his own takeout joint in the UK. While the style of food is BIR (British Indian Restaurant), the principles do come from Indian and Bangladeshi cooking.
The gravy is made by first creating a base gravy: Sweating onions for 40-60 minutes in oil and water (optionally together with additional vegetables like peppers and cabbage), then blended for several minutes until you have a completely smooth sauce. This base gravy is then reusable across almost any kind of gravy dish.
You then use the base gravy to build your dish, adding spices and things like tomato paste, tomatoes (he prefers passata for smooth sauces), ginger-garlic paste, yogurt, coconut milk, etc. While some of these things impact thickness, the viscousness of the final gravy first and foremost comes from the base gravy.
I recommend the book. It has a lot of classic recipes and tricks that most cookbooks leave out.
This is roughly what I use. It's from his e-book, which I recommend if you're into BIR/Westernized Indian curries (tikka masala/butter chicken, etc.), or just Indian food in general.
If you want to get into Indian without getting a ton of spices, pick up the book 5 Spices, 50 Dishes: Simple Indian Recipes.
In reality there are lots of Indian recipes that are not complex, and don't use tons of ingredients outside of the core spices. A lot of day to day Indian cooking is done this way. This book goes into detail about 5 core spices (chili powder, cumin, coraidner, mustard seed, and turmeric) and uses them to create awesome dishes that are easy and delicious!
My understanding is that BIR is heavily influenced by Bangladeshi cuisine, where this more complicated gravy (using cabbage, peppers, etc.) is used. Julian Voigt, who is a chef at a BIR restaurant, talks about it in his excellent The Secret to That Takeaway Curry Taste.
I recommend the e-book The Secret to That Takeaway Curry Taste by Julian Voigt. The title sounds a bit hyperbolic, but it's really spot on. Voigt is a professional chef at an Indian restaurant in the UK, and he was really the first Western chef to popularize techniques such as the base gravy, which are really important to this style of food. The book is self-published and looks a bit slapdash, but the recipes and techniques are superb. He also has videos on YouTube under the name Curry Academy.
I bought this book, paperback, for a fraction of this price. Digital is your smartest bet. It was my first attempt at Indian cooking. I really enjoyed it, because it has so many recipes.
660 Curries https://www.amazon.ca/dp/B01DZ0V9ME/ref=cm_sw_r_apan_glt_5GDV707NN1VX9GC7MR64
The spice mixes she has in this recipe book are great. I make some and freeze it in ice cube trays, then just use a couple with some veg and rice. Indian Instant Pot® Cookbook: Traditional Indian Dishes Made Easy and Fast https://www.amazon.com/dp/B075HHYXWF/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_glt_DCH893FAJ1JT5CTNVK7N
There's a book literally about this: The Secret to That Takeaway Curry Taste. Normally, I avoid books claiming to reveal a "secret", but this one is written a British chef who runs a small takeaway curry joint, and he does in fact provide the keys to recreating exactly what he makes in his own restaurant. The e-book is well worth the price. The author also has a YouTube channel, which shows off the recipes.
In my opinion, the key to a thick, rich sauce is the base gravy, which is made primarily of onions finely blended with oil and water (plus some other ingredients like tomatoes), and acts as a thickener and a base for all the other ingredients in a dish.
Yoghurt is also key in dishes like tikka masala; Indian-style is preferred, or Greek if you can't that. But unlike many recipes I see online, the amount of yoghurt is limited. British-Indian cooking is influenced by Bangladeshi cuisine, and also uses desiccated coconut and small amounts of sugar quite a bit.
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Goan Beef Roast: Recipe from Beyond Curry Indian Cookbook: A Culinary Journey Through India
This recipe was picked to coincide with the cuisine of the week.
- 2lb Beef Roast
- 1 tablespoon Ginger-Garlic Paste
- 1.5 teaspoons of lime juice
- 2 teaspoons of white vinegar
- 15 garlic cloves
- 2" piece of ginger
- 8 peppercorns
- 5 whole cloves
- 1 cinnamon stick
- 1 tsp turmeric powder
- 1 tsp of cumin seeds
- 2 tbsp of oil
- 1.5 tsp of sugar
- 1 red onion
- Chiles to taste
So, score the beef and marinate in the ginger-garlic paste in the fridge for 20 minutes. While that sits make a paste of lime juice white vinegar, garlic, ginger, peppercorn, clove, cinnamon, turmeric, and cumin. Smear that all over the beef and let rest for up to overnight. Sear the beef, brown the onions, and then braise it. Make a sauce out of the braising liquid. Serve.
Seems like an odd thing to put in. The best recipe I have found is from Julian Voight Here.
It takes some time to make but is well worth it.
This eBook. It's written by a chef who runs a small British-Indian takeaway restaurant. The recipes are the same as the ones he actually uses, and they're fantastic. It's the first and only book — that I know — that really shows how to make a restaurant-style tikka masala, for example. He also has a ton of videos on YouTube where he walks you through the recipes from the book.