Cookbooks - Indian Redux

During my three-year stint as a vegetarian in New York, I often felt like I was missing out on the truest pleasures of food. So many cuisines centered around meat as a main or crucial flavoring. Then I started cooking Indian food at home. Here, at last, was a vegetarian tradition where nothing lacked - aromatic bean dals and rice pilafs, complex and sensual curries, chutneys that playfully jangled your senses alive. One problem, though. Those Indian recipes were laborious. So many steps and critically timed additions to make one little vegetable dish.

Life would have been worlds easier if I’d had a copy of Suvir Saran’s Indian Home Cooking (Clarkson Potter, 2004). Saran, a caterer, instructor and chef at Devi restaurant in New York, directly addressed the issues of painstaking classic Indian cooking with this collection of recipes. “Even in India, Indian food has changed dramatically in the last 50 years,” he notes in the introduction. “The country has modernized ingredients, recipes and cooking techniques with extraordinary quickness.”

Instead of draining curdled milk for hours to make paneer cheese, Saran suggests baking ricotta cheese until it’s the texture of paneer (his recipe for saag paneer, the spinach and cheese dish ubiquitous to Indian eateries, is fresh and lovely in its simplicity). Dishes like coconut chicken with cashew (yes, both veg and non-veg recipes are included) and stir-fried mixed summer squash are quick and easy enough to cook on a weeknight. He even includes an Indian take on banana pudding, vanilla wafers and all.

If you’ve ever been curious about cooking Indian cuisine, this is the book to start out with. You’ll be amazed by the intricate flavors achieved from Saran’s mindfully stripped-down techniques. You’ll no doubt find that the zesty numbers you whip up from this book taste much better than the excessively oily, warmed over food served in many Indian eateries.??






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