Stockport brothers launch free recipe e-book that helps people cook Indian takeaway dishes at home

Two Stockport brothers are on a mission to make cooking restaurant-quality Indian food at home easy and affordable – and they have released a free e-book of recipes to help people do just that.

Brothers Ali and Mohammed Zaman, based in Woodley have been running restaurants and takeaways in the North West for over 30 years. But recently, they noticed that it was becoming increasingly more difficult to reach new customers and started to look at ways to diversify their business.

At the end of 2022, they started East at Home, an online shop selling ready-made curry pastes, sauces and spice bundles as an affordable at-home alternative to takeaways.

What did Ali Zaman say about East at Home?

Ali told ManchesterWorld: “Based on our experience running takeaways, we noticed that people were cutting back – some people would order a couple of times a week – so customers are really feeling the cost of living.”

“They’d like to eat that sort of food but the cost is not justifiable as much. What we’ve got is, what we think is, a viable alternative where you’re not having to spend a fortune, but you’re still getting that same taste at home.”

Ali added that the ingredients they sell can “go a long way” and allow customers to make their favourite take-out meals on a budget.

He said: “There’s an initial cost of buying the spices and pastes, once you’ve got those, you’d easily make a curry at less than half the cost of a takeaway. That’s the minimum cost. Some of the dishes you’d make for a fraction of the cost of a takeaway.”

The idea of releasing the e-book came about in response to the number of customers asking for advice on how best to use their products. Since the book was released at Christmas, Ali said the response has been “phenomenal,” with over 10,000 downloads and counting. Their customer base now spans the whole of the UK.

What is British Indian Restaurant cooking?

Part of East at Home’s winning formula is that they focus on a particular style of cuisine known as British Indian Restaurant cooking. It is a concept that has developed in the UK over the last six decades with the rise in popularity of Indian food.

Ali explained: “It’s slightly different from your run-of-the-mill jars that you get in supermarkets, it uses proper ingredients.

“The methods and techniques are different from how you’d cook things at home. In a restaurant kitchen, typically, you’ve got to get a curry out in ten minutes, whereas at home, you’d spend an hour cooking the curry.

“To get that curry cooked really quickly you have to do a lot of preparation -- you have to prepare the paste, some of the sauces, and then you’re combining things together very quickly at the stage of serving the customer. That results in a different type of taste and a particular flavour that you wouldn’t get if you didn’t use those methods.

“The other thing is, with restaurant-style cooking, over the years it has been adapted to more of a western palette, so it’s not authentic what you’d get in India, it is very much what people have been used to eating out in restaurants and takeaways in the last 40 years, when Indian food has become really popular.”

What do they sell and where to buy

The East at Home product list has all the necessary base ingredients for some of the nation’s favourite Indian dishes. Ali said their biggest sellers are the “classics” like chicken tikka masala, madras and his personal favourite the jalfrezi, which he says has a “nice kick to it.”

A good place to start for first-time customers is the BIR base gravy, which is same base that is used in commercial kitchens. You can get three 400g pouches for £9.99. Each pouch makes about two curries and they can be stored in the cupboard at room temperature for up to one month. They also sell madras paste, masala paste and tomato paste.

Other products include spices like turmeric powder, coriander powder and Garam Masala, as well as a mixed powder containing 11 different spices, and premade marinades for tikka and onion bhajis.

All the products can be found on the East at Home website, where you will also find a download link for the e-book.

What is next for East at Home?

Following on from the success of their online shop and e-book, Ali and Mohammed have started looking into different retailers and outlets and hope to have their products available to buy in shops at some point this year.

They are also looking at moving to a new premises with a bigger kitchen to keep up with the demand.