Welcome home! Please contact lincoln@icrontic.com if you have any difficulty logging in or using the site. New registrations must be manually approved which may take several days. Can't log in? Try clearing your browser's cookies.
Indian Cuisine
Vagabond
Explorer
There is an Indian store in town that I've been visiting lately and buying snacks and tea here and there. I was wondering if anyone was familiar with Indian cuisine and could give me some ideas for some dishes I should look to make, or any kind of food or drinks that I should look for.
0
Comments
chicken tikka is fairly easy
How do you pronounce that? Ticka or Teeka? I don't wanna look like an idiot when I ask them about it lol
tee-ka...according to my Pakistani son
another delicious dish is chiken makani (butter chicken)
Chicken Korma. Buy a jar of sauce, mix it with cooked chicken and you're set.
lassi is easy to make, plain yogurt and milk (traditionally water) plus sugar (or honey) and blend - add banana or mango for more luxury.
curry, of all varieties, is pretty easy to make (it can get complex, too, if you want it to, lol) Masala is pretty easy, too.
You should be able to find recipes online. Most of the stuff you can even get at standard larger grocery stories, but they will be better quality from an Indian store (usually). The only thing that can really get expensive is Saffron, which is a spice. But it's delicious.
Paneer Makhani if you eat cheese.
And Lassi. Yummo! It's a yogurt based drink. Some people like them plain, but I usually like the fruit flavors, especially mango. You can probably buy them prepackaged, but they are cheaper if you just make your own, again, recipes online
Excuse my ignorance but I thought curry was a spice.
Like a plant
curry powder is the main spice used in curry dishes. A curry dish is pretty much a dish that uses curry powder (among other things). Usually served as a type of a stew served over rice, or, pureed and made as a soup. Vegetable, shrimp and chicken curries tend to be the most popular, though I made a spinach curried soup once that was amazing.
Use curry paste, rather than powder, learning to grind and use fresh spices will take a lifetime.
Basic curry paste method:
fry onion in a lot more oil than usual
add tablespoon or two of paste
add ingredients to curry
simmer very low till cooked
towards end add ginger and garlic
offer to Buddha statue before becoming attached to table
serve with rice or chapatti and yum yab-yum
When I was talking about the curry powder, I meant the pre-made stuff you can just buy (at least in the US, I assume it's available elsewhere?), without having to buy everything separately yourself. I do sometimes make a batch myself just for fun, but I use a coffee grinder to grind it all up, lol. I usually use Simply Organic Curry Powder when I buy it.
I'm not a vegetarian but I have found that Indian vegetable dishes are better than their meat dishes. Just personal choice. A good dhaal is lovely (lentils) or palak paneer (cheese) is good.
curry is a spice, but it is not itself from a plant. It is a mix of many different spices. They are all a bit different, as there is Thai curry and Indian curry, some are really spicy (hot) and some are more mild. It usually has turmeric, coriander, yellow mustard, cumin, cayenne, sometimes chili powder, cardamom...and so on. Which is why many people buy the pre-made powders or pastes, it's a lot of work to get everything figured out as far as how much to add of what, and to grind if it needed and so on. Though, there are a lot of recipes online too for how to make your own curry powder, but there are so many options and you just don't know what you'll like, and it can be a waste of time and money to buy all the stuff and spend time mixing it up only to find you don't like that particular mixture.
Anyhow, all this curry talk has given me a horrible craving!
The benefit of buying all the spices individually is that you can tailor the ratios of each spice to your taste and to each specific dish. It's said there are as many ways to prepare a dish as there are families in India, because every family will have their own recipe with a different flavor profile. I personally find the prepared curry mixes a bit bland or often too bitter. Some spices need to be "bloomed" in oil longer than others (for instance, coriander and cardamom are very fragile spices and can become unpleasant if cooked as long as, say, cinnamon, which becomes milder with time). Clove is also something that needs to be used sparingly, but most prepared mixes often use too much of it. But there's no arguing the convenience factor.
Most Indians buy the spices individually or specific "masala" preparations. "Masala" is the closest equivalent to curry powder you will find in India: it refers to specific mixes of spices. The composition varies depending on the dish, so you get kofta masala (for kofta curry, a dish prepared using meatballs in a tomato-based sauce) or tandoori masala (the spice mix used to prepare tandoori-baked chicken).
I don't like the prepared mixes...particularly the packaged stuff (like masala mix). i don't even like some of the preps like garam masala.
We found a Korma sauce that comes in a jar - at Whole Paycheck - that's actually pretty good. Not as good as Ho-Made, but who has the time?
I've thought about taking some Indian cooking classes.
Also, I had a dessert dish made with yogurt, cinnamon and bananas. Delish! Don't remember the name. Anyone know?
I buy all my spices whole and in small quantities.
I roast them in a heavy metal skillet, and then grind them as needed. I'm fortunate to have a grocer nearby who has proper, fresh turmeric root, which I use liberally in all types of cuisine, not only Indian.
I mix my freshly-roasted, ground spices with a little water, before use, to the consistency of single cream.
I add this to the ghee (which I also make myself) and fry it gently.
I was taught this technique by our long-past previous neighbour, who told me that using dry spices in ghee will fry and burn them, making them taste and smell acrid, but by mixing them into a cream, they cook more slowly and gently.
She used to make her family's chappatis by hand. And given that there were six members of her family, her chappati dough container was huge. She would make at least 30 at a time....
Her food was lush, and I learned a lot from her....
Wow!......homemade spices....you ladies and guys are fierce! I know who will be in charge of the NB potluck ..
.. I've never tried Indian food. I'm not crazy about curry, either.
For the record...I'm known as the queen of bland. Hahaha.
I can't cook from scratch for nothing in the world. My sister and I grew up on a lot of cereal and sandwiches....and finger foods. Fruit and veggie trays...stuff like that.
I only within the last couple of years have started to teach myself to cook. I pick one dish at a time, and when the kids haven't complained...I add it to the dinner rotation.
We do still make African pepper sauce from scratch bec it goes on everything around here. And yes....more than once, we had to evacuate the house bec of the pepper fumes...lolololol. Habeneras and scotch bonnets cook down all day with tomatoes and seasonings.
My H went to university to study for his Law degree, and a fellow student was a wonderful lady, married with kids.... she is as far as he is concerned, a star solicitor. She is brilliant at her job, extremely well-informed, intelligent and he respects her enormously (Law is still very much a 'male-oriented profession in the UK...) My H has a first-class honours degree, himself, so he recognises talent when he sees it.
In the kitchen?
She could burn water.
her toast is always cremated, and she regularly posts hilarious tales of kitchen disasters - complete with photos - onto facebook, much to the delight of avid followers of her kitchen capers. She should have gone into culinary comedy....
Roti and paratha are very good, and don't require any special spices. They're just delicious breads!
If you need some ideas, Majula's Kitchen and Bhavana's Kitchen are great Youtube channels with tons of recipes from the subcontinent.
Hi,
there a lots of idian books about cooking. Buy and try. Or better go to India, get the taste. I got it and every friday i do indian cooking.
anando
I do Indian cooking every day....
The Indian answer to Italian tomato sauce... http://www.spiceupthecurry.com/category/curries/paneer-gravies/ Goes with just about everything.
I bet it doesn't go with zabaglione.
(Mind you, neither does Italian tomato sauce.....:D )
I was out of town and in a small shopping center saw a store called Vishnu Market. Intrigued, I stopped in and it turned out to be a small Indian grocery store, selling many things I had never seen or heard of. The proprietor was Indian but it was closing time so I bought two items to be polite, ready to heat'n'eat rice packets, one Lemon Rice and one Tomato Rice, by a company called MTR. When I got home I heated up the Lemon Rice packet.
This stuff qualifies as weaponized food. I had to make a gigantic vat of regular rice to stir this into, to get the spice level down to napalm level.
I still have the Tomato Rice, if anyone here wants me to send it to them. Not sure if it's legal to send incendiary devices through the mail, though.
Masala tea, you may find it available as teabags . . . basically spiced tea.
I am still getting my head around @Vastmind and her 'bland' food with African chilli sauce on everything . . .
Chilli is the one thing that puts people off curry until they get the chilli bug . . .
Korma is a mild bland creamy curry for the beginner. Another way to get into curry is via Indian pickles, mango is usually the mildest. Personally I like whole chilli or garlic pickles.
Bit of pickle on a pizza - yum.
Ready sauces that you add to meat or veg are easy for beginners, again buy the mass market versions to start with. Start mild.
Bland from the start, I mean. You can add pepper sauce to a cardboard box and it won't be bland, hahaha. I'm learning to season on the front end. Most people and even my kids can't do the full flavor pepper sauce so I need to learn to make things stand on their own. Marinades are my friend......
True, you got me there.