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Tips and Techniques

While compiling, perfecting and tweaking the recipes in this book over nearly a decade, I have accumulated lots of cooking tricks and shortcuts from trained cooks in India, America and of course, my family. These basic techniques and cooking tips will be of use to you time and time again and particularly if you haven’t spent a lot of time in a kitchen. For those busy and hectic days when you want to skip the cooking part and get right to the eating part, I give you time-saving tips to prepare the food days in advance and use freezing, refrigeration and reheating techniques without compromising the taste and texture.

Over the years, I’ve noticed that my cooking students often ask the same questions or run into the same problems when preparing a dish. This list of tips is meant to answer those questions and, I hope, keep you running smoothly in the kitchen without any snags.

▶ It is a good idea to be prepared at each step—so I recommend reading the entire recipe beforehand to make sure you have the right ingredients, cookware, lids and utensils close at hand before you get started rather than frantically searching for something in the middle of a recipe.

▶ Compared to typical American portions, you might think that the serving sizes in this book are small, but since a well-balanced Indian meal is comprised of a variety of condiments and dishes, including bread and/or rice, the serving sizes should be adequate. If you are in a rush and only have time to prepare one main dish and plain rice or bread, you may want to double the recipe depending on the number of people you are serving.

▶ For convenience and to save time, I recommend getting an Indian spice box (masala dabba) and keeping it filled with your most frequently used spices so you can have them at your fingertips.

▶ If you are using raw meat, chicken, fish or seafood that is chilled in the refrigerator, remove it from the refrigerator to allow it to come to room temperature or at least warm up a bit for faster and even cooking. This is most important for big, thick cuts of meat such as lamb rib chops or chicken thighs and drumsticks.

▶ When heating oil in a saucepan or skillet, heat it until it is hot, but not overheated and smoking. You can test the heat of the oil by adding a very small amount of the first ingredient to be added—for example, a pinch of chopped onions or a few cumin seeds. If the oil starts bubbling in tiny bubbles around the food, the oil is sufficiently heated. If nothing happens, the oil is not yet heated.

▶ To check the heat of a dry pan or skillet, hold your palm directly above the pan. You should be able to feel the heat.

▶ If you accidentally add cumin seeds to an overheated pan, or if you cook them too long in oil and they burn and turn black, simply discard them along with the oil and start again. Burnt cumin seeds will ruin the taste of your dish and they are unsightly.

▶ When adding liquid ingredients or ingredients that have a lot of moisture in them to hot oil, be careful of splatters. Food such as onions, tomatoes, washed and drained rice, washed fresh coriander leaves or curry leaves will cause the oil to splatter. Do not stand too close or bend close to the pan when adding these ingredients to the hot oil.

▶ When roasting or tempering (frying in oil) mustard seeds, do not lower your face near the pan because the hot mustard seeds may pop out of the pan and can hit your face or eyes. To be on the safe side, you can use a splatter screen especially if you think the oil has been overheated.

▶ For quicker cooking times, the best flavor and their beautiful deep red color, always use fully ripe, soft, red tomatoes. In the cooking process, tomato skins usually separate from the flesh. For better presentation, I often remove the loose tomato skins before serving the dish.

▶ You will notice that I use onions a lot in my cooking, and in different recipes, they are cooked to different degrees of doneness. I cook with yellow onions simply because they are readily available, well-priced and give good flavor to the dishes. However, based on your personal preference, you may use either yellow, white or red onions. There are different stages of cooking onions, from becoming translucent to a golden brown, brown, dark brown and finally to the point of caramelizing them, when the natural sugars cook and lend a sweet taste. When sautéing onions to make a masala, it is important to brown them until golden so they do not give a raw onion taste to the final dish. Always cut or shred onions just before you are ready to cook them so they do not sit for a while and start smelling off.

▶ I have provided measurements in both American and metric units. Measurements do not have to be exact so do not stress about measuring ingredients precisely. Just try to get them close to the indicated amount especially when making rice dishes and dough for the breads. Do note that the metric measurements are rounded off so you can easily measure the ingredients. Also, note that I use a standard 250-milliliter equivalent when using cup measurements.

▶ My cooking times are based on using heavy cookware on a gas stove. Light cookware can be used and is beneficial in the sense the food will cook faster. However, you have to keep a sharp eye on it and stir the food more frequently because it can easily burn.

▶ If the recipe calls for a nonstick skillet but you prefer to use a skillet without a nonstick surface, simply add an additional tablespoon of oil and stir the food more frequently. If your skillet is not heavy-bottomed, you may also need to lower the heat to keep the food from burning. If I do not specify in a recipe that a nonstick skillet should be used, such as when roasting or tempering spices, then you can use either a non-stick or stainless-steel (or other metal) skillet without increasing amount of the oil, if any, that is called for.

▶ I use plain iodized table salt in all of my recipes. You may adjust the salt to taste by adding a bit more or less than the amount indicated in each recipe. You may also use kosher salt or sea salt if you prefer. Both are coarser than table salt so you will need to add a bit more that what is indicated in the recipes for equal seasoning. Finely ground sea salt can be used in equal amounts to that of table salt.

▶ You can control the fiery spice level in dishes by decreasing or increasing the amount of ground red pepper (cayenne), dried red chili peppers or fresh green chili peppers used in the recipes. In general, the spice level in the recipes is moderate.

▶ If you make a recipe that calls for deep frying, you can save the oil to use again but it is generally not recommended to use oil for deep frying more than twice because the smoking point is altered and harmful gases are released. After the first use, I just leave the oil in the wok, cover the wok and store it in an unwarmed oven until I am ready to use again. Before heating the oil again, if you see too many burnt particles in the bottom of the wok, you can strain them out with a slotted spoon. When you are ready to discard the oil, first let it cool. Then pour it into a sealed non-recyclable container and throw it in the trash. Do not pour the oil down the sink, as it may clog it.