I am very curious as to what substitute you used. Sour cream? (Heavy) whip cream? If so the sweet or the sour type? I find the sweet type to be perfectly inedible when mixed with other food (except with desert, of course.)

Also, I think it comes down to not mixing sweet with salty food like shrimps. The same reason you want a dry white wine this kind of food. I could be totally off the mark, and need to lean more about yoghurt and it's use in cuisine. Quite possible, I must say :-7

Ok Ok - I did the same and used vanilla soy milk and enjoyed.

Brad,

I've long been impressed by your protean talents. You've now serendiptiously happened upon my parents' secret to tandoori cuisine.

Ah! The missing link at last...

Sancerre, not a doubt in my mind. And I promise to shup up, now. ;-)

as any connoisseur of indian cooking will tell you, sour cream is *way* better than yoghurt!

Fruitful error, and not it seems necessity, is the real mother of invention. This is nature's true secret, and it is as true in the kitchen as it is in our DNA coding.

This can be one explanation for the phenomenon of 'multiple discovery' alluded to by Shaalu Mehra. Sour cream is also excellent with goulash, stuffed peppers and central European food generally.

On biryiani, I'm afraid I favour chicken over shrimp (ni color). The best chicken biryani I ever had was back in the UK when a student of mine who had come from Myanmar made it in an enormous deep pan, in layers, and complete with whole potatoes and hard boiled eggs. Once made you could eat it continuously for a week, and the taste got better every day.

If you like biryani, and are ever in Spain again, you should try Arroz al Horno (forget the paella, that's childsplay) since it I seems to share some cultural roots with biryani (time to go back and check trade routes), only one problem for you, in a Spanish restaurant you're unlikely to find raita.

And Jean-Paul, with any of this stuff I'd definately go for red not white. Leave the Sancerre in the fridge where it belongs, and try something simple like Bourgogne Passetoutgrain.

Thinking on, I'd hazard a guess that you would probably find some equivalent of sour cream knocking around all over North African cooking, and across the Mediterranean generally. Which puts me in mind of another deadly ingredient: peanut butter. A guy from Mali once cooked me a wicked cous-cous, complete with a jar of the stuff in the sauce. Since all this is highly leathal for people with our shape, even in the enlightened days of C-reactive protein, I suggest you excise this immediately from your comments page, and never, but never, think about such things again.

The archaic spelling of "yoghurt" is much better than the current spelling of "yogurt".

Please continue this trend by using "clew", "hyaena", and all other spellings used in E. Nesbit and Conan Doyle works.