According to consultant chef Tony O'Reilly, the most important quality for a ready-made curry is an authentic taste - so we put some of the biggest names on the market to the test.
Indian food and the whole notion of "going for a curry" is now part of British social culture. It used to be an "after the pub" affair when tanked-up young men and women would arrive at their local "curry house", proceed to drink more lager, accompanied by half a hundredweight of poppadums, and then dare one another to see who could eat the hottest curry. Happy days.
Today, it's a different story. For a start, you don't need to leave the pub anymore, as most pubs - or most pubs worth their salt - offer curry of some sort on the menu.
Some pubs are skilled enough to make it themselves - while others tend to rely upon the numerous sauces and ready meals offered by most leading foodservice suppliers.
So, the subject of this month's taste test is curry and by curry we mean ready-made curry meals and NOT sauces. The original idea was to do both, curry meals and curry sauces, but Uncle Ben's was the only company to submit a sauce so there was no contest.
Okay, there were really two taste tests in one this month - standard curry meals such as chicken tikka masala and more specialist products like Persian lamb curry, jalfrezi and so on. The contestants were all known faces in the foodservice marketplace - Emile Tissot, Loxton's, Brake Bros, Thomas Morel. In fact, some suppliers declined to enter when they knew who they were up against.
According to Tony, the name of the game in a curry taste test is summed up in one word: authenticity. Your Business was assuming that all those recruited as judges - regulars of the Prince of Wales, Iffley, Oxfordshire - would have a fair idea of what a good curry was all about and could, therefore, distinguish between good, bad and indifferent products. Tony was hoping they would be able to tell the difference between the "English curry" - curry powder and sultanas and a little too fruity for its own good - and the real McCoy varieties which, hopefully, our contestants would provide.
Tony was planning on serving the curries "neat", which meant without a rice accompaniment. He microwaved some of the curries and boiled some in hot water, in their pouches, on the pub's six burner range. Basically, no skills are required apart from being able to light up a gas cooker, switch on a microwave oven and be capable of boiling a saucepan or two of hot water.
In addition to authenticity, Tony asked the judges to check out the portion sizes of each product.
With the judges in place around the table - representing professions as diverse as building, cabbing, portering, publishing recruitment and computer programming - and huge bowls of curry coming out from the kitchen, the strong smell of curry was in the air and Your Business waited with, er, baited breath for the first signs of a result. One of the judges, Chris Walton, had already broken into a sweat. "It's a good old mixture," he said. "I don't like really hot food unless it tastes good; I don't like food that is just hot."
Another judge, Steve Frost, a taxi driver, said that curries were a matter of personal taste. Asked for his views on the curries he had judged, he said: "Overall it's pretty good. I've moved on to a spicy stage in my life. You grow out of the 'blow your head off' stuff, don't you?"
For Brian Jordan, a college porter, Curry C (Chicken Madras from Brakes) was the best. Like a lot of the judges, Brian visits an Indian restaurant at least once a week, depending on his mood.
Both Phil Kiley, a builder, and Colin Evans, a computer programmer, felt that some of the products were a little bland. In Phil's case, however, 60 to 70 per cent of them were very good.
Colin said: "We probably eat a curry once a week and sometimes make our own. These products are very good compared with those in the supermarket."
His wife Heather added: "The curries were pretty good all round. I didn't like Curry A (Lamb Rogan Josh from Brakes) because it tasted too tomatoey and the meat, when we found it, was very tough."
There was a brief respite for our heavily sweating judges when Tony prepared the seven specialist curries for tasting but soon the judges were back in the fray.
The overall view was that the judges preferred the standard products. Tony said it was par for the course because most publicans would only have one specialist product on their menu.
The end result was interesting to say the least, as Brake Bros was first, second and third in the standard curries test with no other supplier getting a look in - first was chicken passanda; second was chicken Madras; and third was tandoori chicken tikka masala.
They also topped the specialist category with bindi vegetable curry - Emile Tissot was second with Thai green curry and Loxtons was third with its Persian lamb curry.
The final scores