This dish derives its main flavour from a spice blend called vadagam, which can be a little tedious to make. In this recipe, I have simplified the flavours by using whole spices, with equally good results.
I eat the best creme caramel of my life in 26C heat, with life-sized cutouts of the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge smiling down at me from the dining room's slightly slanting balcony. A pigeon snoozes on the lone chandelier, dusty beneath peeling turquoise paintwork, and ceiling fans whirr above crowded, chattering tables. I'm sitting in Britannia and Co Restaurant (Wakefield House, 11 Sprott Road), one of the last remaining Parsi cafes in south Mumbai (or south Bombay as the locals so protectively still call it), and I'm full of food.
Opened in the 19th-century by Parsi settlers Zoroastrians from Iran these cafes, with their magnificently faded, time-capsule dining rooms and speciality dishes, are a gloriously eccentric part of the fabric of Mumbai. They are also democratic and inclusive places, where people of all backgrounds, classes and sexes meet, so you may find a Sikh next to a Hindu or Zoroastrian or a group of young female students dining alone.
First it was the pub, now another great British institution, the curry house, is under threat from supermarket competition. A recent report from consumer analysts NPD Group calculates that visits to ethnic restaurants and takeaways dropped by 123m between 2009 and 2012, with curry lovers increasingly turning to supermarkets as a cheap alternative.
"Ethnic food may not be perceived as the everyday good value it once was," concluded NPD's Guy Fielding, with commentators on industry website Big Hospitality suggesting that price isn't the only factor. At the lower end of the market, it is argued, curry houses are coasting, churning out the same oily, interchangeable Anglo-Indian dishes that they were in the 1980s, while the supermarkets have radically improved their product. One observer claimed that shop-bought curries are now "restaurant quality".
Eating out is everyone's favourite pastime in Singapore one subject that enthusiastically unites the country's diverse population of Chinese, Malays and Indians.
Restaurants are open around the clock, and most of the time are packed to bursting point, serving some of the most delicious and varied cuisines in Asia.
Dandenong is treasure trove of ethnic food, with its own Little India and Afghan Bazaar precincts plus cafes and restaurants offering cuisines ranging from Balkan to Mauritian
Thirty kilometres southeast of Melbourne's city centre, Dandenongs rough edges are being smoothed by a $290m urban renewal project. The suburb is a cultural melting pot, with two-thirds of residents born overseas (twice the national average) and 71% speaking a language other than English. As a consequence it's a treasure trove of ethnic food, with its own Little India and Afghan Bazaar precincts plus cafes and restaurants offering cuisines that include Ethiopian, West African, Sri Lankan, Lebanese, Turkish, Polish, Balkan and Mauritian.
I make coconut dal so often I think I could do it blindfolded. It's a real lifesaver of a dish that all three of my young children love to eat, can be cooked almost entirely from the store cupboard and is perfect for reheating.
I don't spice my dal with chilli. Instead, I prefer to have some lime pickle and assorted chutneys on the table for each person to add to their own bowl.
Continue reading...If I can pass on one useful thing to my children before they head off to college, it will be a good recipe for dhal. More than any other single dish, dhal pulls off the culinary hat- trick of being healthy, delicious and fantastically cheap.
The word itself is derived from the Sanskrit "to split", and refers to the split lentils and other pulses from which it is made. If you can split it, someone, somewhere will be making a dhal out of it. From Pakistan to Bangladesh, from Sri Lanka to the West Indies, red lentils, green lentils, split peas, mung beans, kidney beans, chick peas and others are being turned into dhals.
Continue reading...As Mary-Ellen McTague pointed out in this magazine a couple of weeks ago, cheese-making involves a few basic things: milk, heat, rennet or acid, and time. But in the case of an unaged cheese such as paneer, the alchemy could not be simpler or quicker. Kit-wise, you need a heavy-based saucepan, a wooden spoon, a colander, a clean J-cloth or muslin, and something to weigh down the cheese in the fridge; ingredients-wise, you need only cows' milk and an acid such as lemon juice or white-wine vinegar; and time-wise you need about half an hour near the stove, two hours for the curds to harden in the fridge, and up to two weeks to eat it at its best.
Paneer, like queso blanco, some ricotta and most fresh goat's cheese, is curdled by the addition of an acid other than rennet. Whereas rennet creates a structure within the cheese that is weakened by heat, the acid causes the proteins to stick together. When an acid curd is heated, it's the water that is boiled away, so, rather than melting, as a rennet-curdled cheese would, the cheese gets drier and stiffer as the proteins are concentrated even further.
Continue reading...Eating out is everyone's favourite pastime in Singapore one subject that enthusiastically unites the country's diverse population of Chinese, Malays and Indians.
Restaurants are open around the clock, and most of the time are packed to bursting point, serving some of the most delicious and varied cuisines in Asia.
Continue reading...Like many great dishes, the origins of chicken tikka masala (or CTM, as it's known to aficionados) is a subject of spicy debate. Ahmed Aslam Ali claims he invented the dish, which bears a strong resemblance to Punjabi butter chicken, in his Glasgow restaurant in the early 1970s after a customer complained that his chicken tikka was "a bit dry" a story repeated by innumerable others, often embellished with the detail that the original sauce was made from tinned tomato soup.
But as credit has also been given to everyone from the last Mughal emperor, Bahadur Shah II, to Tony Blair's friend Sir Gulam Noon and Delhi street food vendors, it seems likely that we will never know who first came up with the idea of smothering tandoori chicken in a rich, tomatoey gravy. My suspicions are that chicken tikka masala is simply a British adaptation of the aforementioned murgh makhni Alfred Prasad of the Michelin-starred Tamarind restaurant in London reckons the only significant difference between the two is the onions in the CTM, while Indian-born food blogger Michelle Peters-Jones tells me it's the cream and fenugreek leaves in butter chicken that set it apart.
Continue reading...After I finished this ode to my favourite fruit, I found out the EU is contemplating a ban on the import of Indian mangoes because they don't meet its health and hygiene regulations. With any luck, it will all blow over, but if not, I'll have to send the suits in Brussels some of this week's mango ice-cream just one spoonful should be enough to make them reverse their decision. If that doesn't work, at least there are some alternative sources of mangoes.
So prized is the mango in Bangladesh that it even gets a mention in the national anthem: "The fragrance from your mango groves/Makes me wild with joy,/Ah, what a thrill." But a mango is not a mango is not a mango, and I doubt Bangladeshis are thinking of the hard, mild Tommy Atkins mango that we get year round. No, I'd guess the object of their affections is the intensely fragrant alphonso, whose season is short but so very sweet.
Continue reading...Some Indian gourmands find the word "curry" offensive. It doesn't even exist in India it was invented by the British as a name for any dish including a sauce with spices and chilli, and many argue that the term cheapens a complex, refined cuisine. Personally, I welcome the word for what it has done for Indian food: "curry" has become a global signifier, and the gateway to people loving and delving deeper into our rich culinary heritage.
When making curries, it is crucial never to underestimate the significance of the humble onion. When preparing the base for a curry, the style and degree to which you cook the onion has a huge impact on the end product. For instance, while a keema demands well caramelised onions, a korma relies on them being cooked down to the point at which they are soft and translucent; some dal recipes, meanwhile, require the onions to be boiled with the lentils before being tempered with chilli and spices. In general, though, most dishes that ask for caramelised onions come from northern India, whereas in the south they are more often softened or even used raw.
Continue reading...Visitors tapping into Mumbai's diverse food scene are often distracted by the plethora of newly opened, wallet-busting foreign restaurants that now steal much of the culinary limelight. Adverts and write-ups for Mumbai outposts of London restaurants such as Hakkasan, Yauatcha and San Lorenzo fill the pages of local newspapers. But for those searching for authentic Indian dining experiences, a quick look beyond the restaurant pages leads to other, more creative experiences.
Open to outsiders, as well as Mumbaikars, Gypsy Kitchen offers home cooking from Mumbai housewives who are keen to showcase their heirloom recipes. Fans follow Gypsy Kitchen's FaceBook page and get alerts for pop-up events at local homes, where, for around 2,000 rupees (£20) paid to the host, they eat distinctive, home-cooked meals.
Continue reading...Throughout India, and regardless of class or wealth, every family is united by the fact that rice is at the centre of their meals. In the UK, we are familiar with short-grain, long-grain and basmati, but in reality there is a mind-boggling variety of rice out there. Each region of India and sometimes even a pocket of land within a region produces its own individual grain with unique characteristics.
Rice is also hugely versatile, and the variety of textures it takes on through different treatments (dried, wet, fried) mean it can work in almost any dish, from snacks to biryanis (my favourite is the mutton biryani from Tunde's drive-thru in Lucknow), and from breakfast to dessert.
Continue reading...Courgettes are coming into season, so I smuggled some into my aloo dum (potato curry) recipe to freshen it up, and found it was a bit of a winner.
(Serves 2)72p a portion
500g potatoes, diced, 15p
2 tbsp oil, 6p
2 fat cloves of garlic, finely chopped, 6p
1 onion, sliced, 10p
1 red chilli, finely sliced, or pinch of dried, 9p
½ tsp turmeric, 5p
1 tsp cumin, 10p
Pinch of salt, 1p
400g chopped tomatoes, 35p
1 large courgette, 36p
Few sprigs of fresh coriander,10p
From the street, to the gymkhana clubs, to the home, there is an Indian snack to suit every occasion. Whether it's a potato chaat that fills a hole as you cross the city, or a meaty tandoori morsel to accompany your drink at the club, there is always an excuse for a tasty bite. In fact, in some circumstances snacks are vital the main meal at Indian dinner parties is rarely served before 11pm, so you rely on snacks to line the stomach and help get you through the night. As soon as dinner is served, the drinking stops.
The British influence in India is evident in high tea parties, though we tend to go for pakoras and samosas rather than cucumber sandwiches and cakes. Some of my fondest memories of our obsession with snacking, however, come from when my grandfather used to take me to play golf with him in Delhi. We'd have to walk past the Annexe cafe to get from the fifth hole to the sixth, and never made the short trip without stopping for a quick refuel. We weren't any safer from temptation on more distant holes, either, because vendors armed with kathi rolls and beer patrolled the greens. The way snacks infiltrate every aspect of society shows the remarkable extent to which Indian life revolves around food.
Continue reading...Choosing from a menu is never straightforward where I'm concerned I'm always worried I'm going to make the wrong choice, and miss out on something I'll never get the chance to try again. But as soon as I sink into the soft flock cushions favoured by British Indian restaurants of the old school, all such worries melt away I know exactly what I'm going to have. Inevitably it's a spicy lamb curry from the chef's specials, with tarka dal and saag paneer, accompanied by a plain naan, ideally one the size of the napkin.
Now, I can make some pretty decent lamb curries, even if I sometimes have difficulty identifying one, and I'm a dab hand at dal, yet the simplest dish fried spinach and fresh cheese has proved a remarkably tough nut to crack. Nothing I've tried has come close to matching up to the garlicky, greasy greens served in the humblest of curry houses; nice, sure, but not the kind of dish you'd go back to like a woman obsessed. It seemed time for a more systematic approach just how do they do it?
Continue reading...From hip restaurants to traditional curry houses and takeaway vans, the city has Indian food to savour
Having moved into the digs of the former Melbourne Wine Room in Grey Street, St Kilda, Babu Ji has quickly established itself by offering fresh and unexpected Indian flavours as well as creating a lively buzz with non-stop Bollywood dance routines projected on the back wall. The okra fries are an exquisite and generous entree; the fig, pomegranate and cashew kofta is to die for; and the saag paneer is the best I've had in Melbourne with fresh, smoked Indian cheese buried in tangy spinach and garlic sauce. A cardamom and pistachio popsicle and you'll be full. Babu Ji is stylish, flavoursome, modern and fun.
Continue reading...(Serves 4)
600g pig's cheek and leg meat (you can use normal pork instead of suckling pig, but marinate it for up to 12 hours)
120ml vegetable oil
250g onions, finely chopped
240ml pork stock (or water)
1 tbsp coriander stem, chopped
For the marinade:
100ml Goan palm vinegar (or malt vinegar)
6-8 black peppercorns, crushed
1 tsp sugar
1 tbsp ginger paste (crush with a little water to a paste)
1 tsp garlic paste