White rice is steamed in the usual way.
A vegetable mixture is steamed separately from the rice along with pre-cooked chicken bits frozen previously from a roasted bird.
A sauce is prepared and combined with with finished rice and vegetables.
Sauce featuring fresh garlic and ginger. The liquid base of the sauce is chicken broth and along with this grated ginger and garlic it includes the usual Asian flavoring agents:
* soy sauce
* sake
* sweet mirin
* Three Crabs brand fish sauce
The vegetables are prepackaged cut mixed vegetables with sugar peas added
The chicken is from a whole bird roast, picked apart, frozen previously in a MealSaver vacuum package.
The rice is steamed in chicken broth for 25 minutes on low pressure. The broth includes two teaspoons red curry paste. Two tablespoons ground corn was included with the rice.
Oh, almost forgot to mention fresh cilantro.
About that ground corn. A few blocks from my home is a Cuban restaurant located in an old house. It is very popular with the hip crowd. Always packed with polite people drinking flavored mojitos. One time my date asked me if I could identify the unusual flavor within the plain white rice. I agreed it was unusual but I couldn't put my finger on it. She proclaimed, "It's grits!" She was right, and how well the grits and white rice went together too. I decided to do that. Except I am not using white grits. I am using popcorn that was milled to powder in the Nutrimill. It absorbs a lot of water and tends to turn pasty and firm just like polenta does so a lot of extra liquid must be added. More than what you might imagine for just two rounded tablespoons. It is very easy to error by adding either too much or too little water, and there is no way to know until you take the lid off after the rice steams.
About the curry paste. I picked up a tiny jar of curry paste at Whole Foods. The store is not the grand Whole Foods a few miles off, but rather the little satellite WF a few blocks from my home. They have two types on their shelf, red curry and green curry. This did not instill confidence. Usually curry is named for the Indian State from which it originates or the Asian Country. Because they are usually complex combinations, they vary wildly even the curries with the same name. So much so that it gets down to the individual households all with their own various mixtures. And that tells you, that even you can devise your own curries by mixing your own favorite spices. Then make up a name for it.
My personal curry would inevitably lean toward the Mexican spices, which I favor, and I would probably leave out turmeric because I just cannot see the point of it. I also don't understand fenugreek, but give me time, I still have to experiment with that. I am also really digging celery seed right now and dry mustard, and you don't see those in curries very often. I am somewhat indifferent to cardamon but that is another one which I will keep trying. I have cardamon pods and when I tear them apart inside are tiny black seeds with an intense aromatic licorice flavor that reminds me of those insanely strong mints that come in envelopes that smokers and drinkers use to disguise their breath. I think the cardamon powder that you buy is the entire pod ground up because it would take a ton of pods to get one ounce of those tiny black seeds. I tasted some and it is not nearly as strong as the tiny seeds themselves.
Wanna hear something? Okay, goes like this. There are these little birds that appear on my balcony that hop around the planters out there scrounging for seeds and for nesting material. They look like wrens or some type of little passerine. One of them has a red face and breast, the others look the same but they're plain brown and without any other coloration. They're the cutest little things and I feel sorry for them because they keep coming back for so little reward. The only seeds I have are spices. I also have corn kernels, but those are too big, wheat kernels, sesame seeds, and rice. So I mixed up a bowl of various grains and spice seeds that I thought birds might like, including fennel seed, celery seed, coriander seed, cumin seeds, caraway seeds, everything in my cabinets that are in original seed form. I hope they like them. Maybe they could use some fresh water too.
Perhaps the birds are house finches. The male has a red head, while the female is brown.
ReplyDeleteWe should talk curry sometime. I married into a family that lived in India for many years. They have some strong opinions about what constitutes good curry.
Yes! The birds look exactly like that. Finches, you say. Tomorrow I'll leave the screen door and regular door wide open so maybe I can photograph them when they come back. If they do.
ReplyDeleteI am very interested in your family's strong opinions about what constitutes good curry. Can I safely assume they would include the customary spices that usually come with a standard masala dabba box? This list of Indian spices on Wikipedia has things on it that I never heard of. It makes me want to buy them just to see.
Finches really like thistle seed. Buy a thistle feeder. You’ll enjoy watching the finches, and it’s made so that bigger birds can’t get at the seeds.
ReplyDeleteWe have a friend who is quite the epicurean when it comes to Indian food. You would probably enjoy hitting some restaurants with him. He can tell when the original cooks have moved on from a place. He’s particularly fussy about biryani. For his wedding, he sampled biryani from a dozen restaurants and a few caterers before settling in on one he deemed suitable.
The secret to most dishes in an Indian restaurant? More butter or cream than you would ever want to use when cooking for yourself. If I want a creamy curry, I prefer to use coconut milk, but cream works a slightly different kind of magic.
There are a bunch of spices on that Wikipedia list that I don't recognize. Some sound kinda fun. Quite a few of them (tamarind, for instance) are also used in Mexican cooking, which means that I don’t have to make as many trips to the Indian grocery store.
I don't know what's considered standard for a masala dabba box, but I'm guessing that it most likely matches up with what I know. Powdered coriander, tumeric, cumin, chili, cloves, garam masala (the composition of which can vary widely).
A few years ago, we switched from using bulk spices to using a curry paste to save time. I like Patak's -- a mix of "mild" and "Madras" lets me control the level of heat, depending on who's eating. Even with paste, I'm still starting with mustard seed (always) and adding ginger if I've got it.
My in-laws spent most of their years in South India, where it is common to serve curds (similar to our yogurt) with curry. Raisins, peanuts or cashews, raita, and lime are proper things to add to one's serving, along with mango pickle. I can't tolerate that stuff. I prefer the sweet mango chutney, instead, which most of my in-laws can't stand.
As much as they like the flavors of the South, my father-in-law didn't like to find cardamom pods or coriander leaves in his curry. Coriander powder, of course, is a necessary ingredient, but it shouldn’t dominate. There’s also a general family bias against rose water, but I love me some good, warm gulab jamun, even though ordering it prompts my brother-in-law to remind us, yet again, that he doesn’t like rose water.
There are East African curries that use Indian spices but then add copious fruit. This does not meet with approval. Nor do the super-hot curries of Sri Lanka and Thailand. And don't even bother ordering curry chicken when you eat at a Chinese restaurant with these people.
South Indian dhosa and idli get their own dipping sauces -- sambar, mint chutney and coconut chutney. This is stuff we don't try to make at home.
Tikka is a whole 'nuther discussion.
Once or twice a year, we make a dish they learned to make from a Tamil cook. He called it mulligatawny, but it is unlike any mulligatawny that any of us (or our friends) encountered in or outside India.
It takes a couple days to prepare. The end result is a dish that combines many flavors and textures in each bite -- as in your description of Pad Thai.
The recipe is regarded as a family secret. We'll invite our biryani-loving friend to join us for the meal, but not the prep.
Peter, thanks for all that information. Now I have words to look up; biryani, raita, gulab jamun, dhosa, idli, sambar, tikka.
ReplyDeleteMaybe a good place to start is ordering various things at Indian Restaurants. Actually I already did that a few times and managed to not learn anything at all. I always seem to end up with a big pile of chicken parts falling off the bone in a big bowl of sauce with stuff that gets scooped up with a thin flat bread.
Find a South Indian place that serves dhosa. It will be unlike any other Indian food you've ever had.
ReplyDeleteThis place looks promising, but it really grind my gears to pay $7.50 for what is cheap street food in India. On the other hand, I can't make a good dhosa in my own kitchen, so I fork over the money and try not to think about it.
Sometimes spelled dosai, or dosa, the first syllable is pronounced like "dough." "Sa" rhymes with Open your mouth and say "ahhh."
you can think of dhosa as a pancake or crepe, but that doesn't really capture the essence of dhosa. They are crisp, but not brittle, and meant for you to tear off pieces for dipping.
Plain dhosa are "sada dhosa." Masala dhosa come with a serving of mildly spiced potato curry tucked inside.
Dhosa are always accompanied by small bowls of sambar (like a soupy veg curry) and coconut chutney and mint chutney. Chutney is a bit like a paste, but not as thick as a paste. Maybe you could think of these as finely ground relishes.
Anyhoo, you don't mix up the dips, in the way that you might put salsa, sour cream, and guacamole on the same tortilla chip.
Here's a video recipe -- from the extras on the Bend It Like Bekham DVD. Talk about too many cooks in the kitchen. I love the comments from her mom and auntie.
The video is very interesting.
ReplyDeleteThe girl seems a lot of fun to be around, her mum is more rigid, although she does provide reasons for every single point she insisted on. Very insistent on some things, peel the potato, cut the cauliflower and onion specifically, and then relaxed on other things like ingredients added out of order, accepting varying heat of chiles and the timing of adding the elements, which I would have imagined someone being rigid about.
The end of the video reminded me, once there were three very heavy women in my kitchen. It forced me out. They didn't seem to mind rubbing up against each other just to move about, but I couldn't handle it. The girl's good nature shone through, even though she could predict the picayune proclivities of her mother, which I found most amusing. I wouldn't mind at all watching more of the girl. The two older ladies actually did enhance the whole thing. In the end, it is a very simple dish. Her masala dabba spice box seemed to be typical if a bit more extensive than usual, judging from the boxes available on Amazon. I keep 10X that many spices going, myself, no brag, it's just that I need them. I was a little surprised she used prepared masala curry and not the individual components of her own masala. That alone showed me I don't have to be maniacal about curries in order to be authentic.
But I wonder. My brother remarked he can tell right away when an Indian person lives on a floor of any given apartment because the whole hall smells of curry. He doesn't care for the lingering odor. Another friend said something similar about being sensitive to the smell of curry from a distance and through doors. I use a lot of spices and in combinations that amount to American curries, often prepared Indian curries, yet no one has ever remarked about it smelling like India around here. I use just as much and often more than the girl used in the video. This concerns me. Will I eventually reach a point of saturation, or what? (I keep windows open through the winter and two air fresheners running, sometimes three, maybe that has something to do with it.)
I see several Indian restaurants near my house. I intend to make a point of dropping in and studying their mysterious ways. I bet we can master the subtleties of the dhosa. I imagine most of it is deciding which type we like best and which flours to use. I'm seeing a combination of rice flour and milled beans. If it is something you had in India you hold as the ideal, it probably has to do with the specific bean or possibly the choice of filling.
I think the dhosa batter has to ferment a little. Or maybe that's idli.
ReplyDeleteI've had very good dhosa here in the U.S., so it's not a matter of ingredients. I can't recall ever eating one that I didn't enjoy.
The crucial tool is a big cast iron griddle. Really big. As in bigger than my stovetop.
In the past, I've made small dhosa that fit on my griddle, but it's not the same.
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I don't know if the smell has to do with the particular spices, or if it's that these spices are tossed into hot oil.
When I cook curry, the whole house smells of it, but the smell doesn't linger from one day to the next. Well, usually, I'm reheating the leftovers the next day, so you'd smell it again, but the curry smell is not a permanent feature here.
However, if someone cooked Indian food every day, that might make a difference. But they'd also be cooking it every day, so that would influence the results.
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