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Copyright © 2025 Foodies Only
Copyright © 2025 Foodies Only
5 min
04/02/2026
Mother gravies work since it separates work from creativity. The work, which includes chopping, sautéing, and slow cooking, happens just once. The creativity occurs afterwards in small segments of time. A base gravy, if made correctly, will not only give you one way to prepare a meal but many ways to develop your final dish. The trick is to keep the base neutral and adjust at the finish instead of starting from an adjusted base.
The reason that cooking daily can be exhausting is not that it is hard; it is because it is repetitive. Chopping onions, sautéing tomatoes, waiting for your masala to reduce, etc., all add up. This is where the mother gravy principle works in your favour, this logic of one base, many meals. The basic concept of cooking many different types of food using one similar basic ingredient is already present in Indian cooking; you just do not take advantage of this principle enough. When you batch-cook a well-made and solid mother gravy at the beginning of the week, you can create a flexible base which can provide multiple types of food using a few small modifications in preparation. Therefore, your goal in cooking mother gravy is not to eat the same thing multiple times, but rather to reuse your efforts, rather than flavours.
Mother gravy is a neutral, well-cooked base made primarily of onions, tomatoes, ginger, garlic, and spices that create the foundation for several of the same types of Indian curries. Think of mother gravy as a blank page and not as a completed recipe. There will not be any cream or heavy amounts of garam masala or another dominant spice. When stored, this base can be used for 3-4 days in the refrigerator or frozen in portions for convenience for weekday meals.
The most versatile type of mother gravy is the slow-cooked onion tomato masala. The onions should be cooked to be soft and lightly caramelised, the tomatoes should lose their rawness, and the spices should develop depth. This mother gravy is balanced between sweet-tasting and tangy-tasting and will not favour one or the other. Have the mother gravy a little looser than the desired thickness of your curries, so the mother gravy can thicken once the rest of your ingredients for that specific dish have been added. This single batch of mother gravy can create 4-6 meals easily.
Transformation occurs here. Take some of the onion-tomato base, blend until smooth, then (add richness) enrich it. Add butter, cream, a pinch of sugar, and finish with kasuri methi. The base gravy (does most of the work); the fats and aromatics added at the end create a restaurant-style dish. Because the onions and tomatoes have already cooked down, this dish can be assembled quickly, and because it has many layers, it will not be rushed.
With legumes, use the same gravy without any blending or enriching. Simply add cumin, chilli powder, and cooked rajma or chole to your base and allow them to simmer together so the beans can absorb the flavour. Finally, finish off with garam masala and fresh coriander. This is an example of how the gravy adapts because, in this case, the beans require body, whereas with paneer, the beans need richness, which is provided through the gravy. Therefore, the same starting product (the gravy) helps to create a creamy texture with the paneer and a hearty, robust texture with the legumes.
To create a korma-type dish, the base must be recreated again. There’s no longer an onion-tomato base to build off of; instead, you’ll add ground cashews or coconut milk, whole spices, and a variety of mixed vegetables for sweetness and creaminess (from the nuts, not from dairy) to your dish. The fact that the onion-tomato base is so neutral allows the addition of gentler, more fragrant aromatic ingredients without overpowering them. Eventually, the result could look completely different from either of those two types of cuisines (but they do share the same DNA).
The key to batch-cooking mother gravies is to work smart, not hard. It’s about getting things done in the most efficient way possible. By front-loading your effort, you make it much easier and much less stressful to cook in the future. Now you have one base of ingredients for many meals, without having to start from scratch every single day.
