Flavors of India

Low Fat Dum Aloo

2010-01-08T15:30:00.000-08:00

Dum aloo is one of the most popular potato dishes in India. It is usually made with fried potatoes in a spicy tomato-based gravy. Sometimes it is also made with a yogurt-based gravy. In either case, this dish is an oil-hog. I will refer to the original as the high-fat dum aloo. It has been one of my favorites, and I have devised a low fat baked version that does not compromise on taste one bit. This dish is best made with baby potatoes such as the ones on the right.

There are three major steps - 1. Preparing potatoes, 2. Preparing masala, 3. Final Mixing with tomato.

We will describe each one in turn.

Preparing Potatoes

1. We will use 1Kg baby potatoes. First peel potatoes. No boiling or steaming. (In high-fat dum aloo, you pressure cook them first, then peel them). Cut the really large ones into halves.

2. Take a steel fork and poke holes in the peeled aloos as below. It is not as hard as one might think. Pricking is important for the final gravy to soak into the potatoes. Also this prevents potatoes from exploding when we bake them in a subsequent step.

3. Toss the pricked potatoes in very little oil (1-2 teaspoons) in a non-stick shallow pan.

4. Spread the potatoes on a foil or use a baking tray. Bake them on 450F for 45 mins. In the meantime, check them and turn them on their sides after 20 mins or so. Your potatoes should now be brown and crisp like below.

Preparing Masala
There are a variety of ways of preparing the masala. Here I give one version which works fine. Feel free to experiment with your own ingredients.

1. 5-6 Elaichi seeds shelled.
2. 5 Clove seeds
3. 1/2 Cinnamon stick
4. 2 tsp Dhania seeds
5. 1/2 tsp Methi seeds
6. 1 tsp Ajwain seeds

Crush them to a dry powder either in a blender or with a pestle and mortar. Keep aside this masala.

Final Preparation
1. In a frying pan, heat 2 tsp oil.
2. Add 1 large finely chopped onion and fry till it turns translucent.
3. Add the ground masala of previous step into the fried onions and let it fry for a bit more.
4. Add 1 tsp ginger garlic paste and fry for a bit.
5. Add 2-3 tbsp tomato puree into this mixture and fry.
6. Add some more garam masala or kitchen king masala to this mixture and mix well.

7. Put the baked potatoes, add some water and cover it and let it boil on low flame for 10-15 mins. This is how the final dish would look like. Enjoy.

Stuffed Poblano Peppers

2009-08-28T20:44:00.000-07:00

The Poblano pepper (shown on the right) is a type of mexican pepper which is in the same broad family as the familiar capsicum or green bell pepper. I first came across this in California during my internship - they used to make a dish called 'Chile Rellenos' which is basically cheddar cheese stuffed into a Poblano pepper and fried. It just tastes awesome and I started looking for it on the menu of every Mexican restaurant I have been to since - but the california taste never came again.

So I decided that if I want good stuffed Poblano peppers, I have to make it myself. But I didn't want to stuff it with cheese, since it is unhealthy. So I decided to make a desi version - by stuffing with potatoes. Now those of you who like stuffed capsicum would just love this dish. Also, it is a lot easier to stuff the Poblano pepper than the gigantic bell peppers that are available in the USA. Also, the bell peppers here are too mild in taste, whereas the Poblano will fire up the taste buds just right.

This dish is a little more involved than the earlier ones I posted. You first need to prepare the stuffing.

Stuffing:

Ingredients:

1. 2 potatoes boiled and peeled.

You can be pretty creative with how you make the stuffing. Here, I will outline a very rudimentary stuffing, which is the basic aloo paratha stuffing. Take the boiled potatoes, mash them and add the following spices

1. 2 tsp jeera seeds
2. 2 tsp Dhania powder
3. 2-3 tsp Chilli powder
4. Salt to taste

Mix them well and keep aside.

Preparing the Poblano:
1. Take the poblano peppers, carve out the top stem. This is what it will look like.

2. The interior will have a lot of seeds which need to be removed.

This part is important - because if you do not do a good job of removing the seeds, the resulting dish can be too hot to handle. These seeds are not like the capsicum seeds which are too mild anyway. With practice you can figure out the right amount of seeds to leave behind to suit your taste. But if this is your first time - remove all seeds thouroughly.

3. Stuff the aloo-stuffing into the peppers with a spoon. Fill them to the top as shown below.

Frying the Poblano:
1. Take a flat bottom pan and add 2 tsp oil and spread it evenly and heat on low-medium flame.

2. Place the Poblanos in the heated oil and fry.

3. Keep rotating the Poblanos every 2-3 mins till all sides are evenly cooked.

Fry this way for 10-15 mins and it should be done. This is how the final product should look like.

You can sprinkle a little salt on the fried Poblanos to enhance the taste.

Goes best with hot Rice !!!

Spaghetti Squash Pulusu

2009-08-22T09:46:00.001-07:00

Pulusu is a generic name for a class of dishes prepared in Andhra - which are best described as stews of vegetables. Of them all, Pumpkin Pulusu is the most famous of all. So keeping in line with the overall theme of this blog, I set out to make the traditional Pumpkin Pulusu with my quirks. Firstly, it is not easy to get the Indian style pumpkin in the USA. Grocery stores here abound in a variety of squashes. Butternut squash is an excellent substitute for pumpkin, and I have used it in my own version of a traditional kerala dish called Avial with great results. But this time, I chose to experiment with a new squash - the Spaghetti Squash which is shown below.

To Cut:
1. Peel and Cut the Spaghetti Squash.
2. Remove the seeds from the center.
3. Cut into medium sized pieces.

Peeling: Peeling seems unavoidable for this squash since the skin is quite thick. I tried peeling it partially as shown below, but in the end I found that the skin is too thick to be easily eaten.

4. 1 Onion cut into medium pieces
5. A few green chillies chopped.

To Saute:
1. In a cooker, put some oil.
2. Add mustard seeds, heeng and a little jeera.
3. Add green chillies, onions, and the cut squash pieces and saute for a while.

The smell of sauteed squash is just an experience beyond description !! Now the thing should like below.
To Boil:
1. Add water to the above mixture and let it boil for 15 mins or so.
2. To this mixture add tamarind water and coconunt powder.
3. At this stage, I added half a cup of besan to increase consistency. Tradionalists will cringe at this, but well... it came out awesome.

Now you should have something like below.

Final Seasoning:
Make a final tadka with
1. Chana Dal Seeds
2. Urad Dal Seeds
3. Curry Leaves

and put the tadka on the Pulusu. Crush and add a piece of Jaggery or a tsp of sugar into the Pulusu.

Mix well, boil for a while and turn it off and let it stand for a while.

This goes best with hot rice and papads.

Final results came out excellent ! Spaghetti Squash turned out to be quite an appropriate substitute for the pumpkin.

Turai Ki Dal

2009-08-18T16:13:00.000-07:00

Turai, Thori, Beerakaya, Ridged Gourd is used all over India. However, it is not extremely popular as a tasty dish - I used to get this to eat when I was sick. However, like the Chayote Squash about which I blogged in the last post, Turai is also a mild tasting vegetable. Hence, the flavor of any dish made with it is directly related to what else you are putting in it. So the flavor that you can get is almost unlimited in scope.

Many people dislike Turai due to its thick skin. But we will use it to our advantage to get crisp pieces of vegetable. How do we minimize peeling for Turai ? Just peel the rough sharp ridges. Do not peel the region between the ridges. See the pic below.

Now, Turai is usually cooked with Moong Dal. Instead, we will cook it with a mix of Moong + Toor dal. The Moong + Toor combo is actually a very potent combo in general, which is not fully exploited in Indian cooking. You can bewilder your guests with this dal combo, even the astute ones cannot easy tell what dal it is - especially when you consider that the relative proportions of the dals can be varied to give rise to a large variety of flavors ! Great opportunity to experiment with.

In this recipe, we will take a somewhat brain-dead proportioning - half toor + half moong. Even such a blind guess works out great.

To Pressure Cook:

1 cup Moong + 1 cup Toor

Pressure cook the dals together and in the meantime do the following steps.

To Cut:

1 Turai - partially peeled as shown above - cubed into medium sized pieces as shown below.

2-3 Green Chillies cut into small pieces.

To Boil:

In a large pan, add enough water to just about submerge the turai pieces.

1. Add the chilli pieces and..

2. The turai pieces and...

3. 3-4 teaspoons of Coconut powder (yes !!! coconut powder - on the request of my friend Anshu who wanted coconut and tamarind recipes).

Cover it up and let it boil for 10-15 mins on medium flame. If you are feeling lazy, you can put all the above ingredients and pressure cook them with the dals. But that makes you lose control on how soft you want the turai pieces.

After 10-15 mins, the turai pieces start to look like below.

As you can see, the flesh is almost about 50% dissolved into the water. You stop boiling now. At this stage, the skin is just about right in crispiness. Now add these boiled contents into the cooked dal. Do not discard any of the boiled water - it contains 50% of the turai flesh !

Tadka:

Usual tadka with 2-3 tsps of Mustard seeds, 2 tsp Jeera seeds, Heeng and Chopped Garlic. Chopped Garlic goes awesome with these types of dals. Make the tadka on medium flame, so as not to burn the garlic. The smell of tadka should be amazing by now.

Add the tadka to the dal. Add some chilli powder if you want it spicy. Adjust salt. Can also add a dash of Garam Masala to the dal if you want to make things really interesting. Just in case, the dal doesnt turn out good, Garam masala also serves to cover up the flaws - I added 1 tsp to this dal. Now the final dal looks like below.

Enjoy with hot rice or chapatis.

Flavors:

I don't want to sound over analytic here. But consider the following

Coconut......southy flavor

Turai..... anywhere flavor

Toor + Moong .... punjabi flavor

Garam masala.... northy flavor

mera bharat mahan...

The Chayote Squash

2009-08-16T13:50:00.000-07:00

The Chayote Squash (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chayote) is a somewhat unusual vegetable in India. Most indians haven't seen it or heard of it. Though, apparently Tamilians use this vegetable often. It was one of those days when I was bored of all the regular vegetables and I decided to use this one.

Properties: Lets look at it first. It looks somewhat like a Guava, but with a strange 'fold'. I have found this vegetable to be quite versatile, and have succesfully used it in Dals, Sambars, Kootu, and even in curry form. This vegetable has a very mild taste, and often takes over the taste of the main gravy. So when using this vegetable, remember the gravy is the real contributor to taste. The vegetable's contribution would be to provide crunchy and juicy pieces to chew on that oozes with the flavor of the dish. And my recommendation is never to peel this vegetable. The skin is quite thin anyway, and if you peel it, the whole thing just gets mashed. And not to mention, the nutrient loss is always magnified when you peel vegetables (This will be a recurring theme in this blog - how to minimize vegetable peeling).

Nutrition: Courtesy http://www.produceoasis.com/Items_folder/Vegetables/Chayote.html

Chayote Squash is very low in Saturated Fat, Cholesterol and Sodium. It's also a good source of Niacin, Vitamin B6, Pantothenic Acid, Magnesium and Potassium, and an excellent source of Dietary Fiber, Vitamin C, Vitamin K, Folate, Zinc, Copper and Manganese.

All good on the nutrition front. That said, even very mild cooking destroys most of the Vitamin C content in any vegetable. So, for vitamin C you have no option but to eat raw vegetables that are high in vitamin C.

A Curry:

Here we will make a very simple curry that is just too fast to cook. Very minimal tuning of taste. Thoda idhar udhar of ingredients barely matters. And infact, thoda idhar udhar is the key to experimentation !! We will make a semi-dry curry.

To Cut:

One Chayote Squash in small-medium sized pieces. Do Not Peel the skin.

To Grind:

1. 5 tea-spoon (tsp) Coconut Powder - Can use fresh coconut if you have it

2. 3 tsp black Mustard seeds - can try 4 tsp if you love mustard paste.

3. 3 tsp Dhania Seeds.

4. 2 tsp Jeera Seeds.

5. 1-2 Red Chillies or 1-2 tsp red chilly powder

6. 1 tsp Tamarind paste

7. 2 tsp Chana Dal or besan - I prefer Chana Dal

Grind them all with a glass of water. Do not worry about consistency - just make sure all the above are well grinded.

To fry:

In a frying pan, take 1-2 tbsp oil. Add

1. Mustard seeds and wait till they splutter. Then..

2. Add jeera seeds. Wait till they turn a bit brown.

3. A bit of Heeng.

4. Add the cubes of cut Chayote squash.

Keep frying the Chayote Squash on medium flame till it begins to turn a bit brown. Then add the paste you made in the previous step and add some more water to the mixture. Mix it well. Add salt according to your taste. Cover it up and let it simmer on low flame. Keep checking on it and keep mixing it so the bottom doesn't burn. It should be done in about 10-15 mins. You can cook it more if you prefer soft pieces, or a bit less if you prefer crunchy pieces. You should try both if you are experimental !

Flavors:

As I said earlier, the Chayote by itself does not have much flavor. Most of the flavor comes from the gravy. The gravy has a sweet, spicy and tangy flavor.

The coconut, tamarind and red chillies in the gravy provide a nice south indian feel.

Dhania and Jeera give it a northy feel.

The mustard paste gives it a punjabi feel.

Overall, you would not be able to place it anywhere !!! Enjoy the Chayote Curry.

So what's new about this ?

2009-08-16T13:32:00.000-07:00

Alright, after enough experimentation and trials and errors, I decided to related my culinary experiences to the world. So what's new about my experiences that would want you to listen. In general this blog will be about Indian food. But what you will find is a flavor of food which will be an eclectic fusion of a variety of flavors of India. It will be very hard to pigeon-hole these recipes as south indian or north indian or east or west. The main reason behind such a seemingly strange fusion, is my own preferences in taste and my talent in spotting potential improvements or additions to otherwise standard recipes. In addition, the choice of ingredients will be made very flexible, so that you can adapt to the locally available produce. This in essence is my style of cooking - always on the lookout for replacing old and boring ingredients with something new and different. Imagine a north indian curry that uses dhania-jeera with the totally south indian curry powder. Or a south indian sambar made with unusual vegetables like the zucchini and the summer squash.

Having lived with roommates from all over India, has given me a broad exposure to the flavors of India. That combined with my natural flair for combining things in new and unusual ways has resulted in me dishing out stuff that always elicits the response 'Mmmmm, this rajma tastes goooooood, but so different' or 'Mmmmm this sambar is awesome, but doesnt quite taste like one'. So if you are a purist, then sorry this blog is not for you. But if you love experimentation, and appreciate interesting twists to age-old recipes, then you will enjoy this blog.

With this, I end the introduction, and we start off. I will post pics soon.