Yakhni Pulao

Honestly, not much needs to be said about this dish. As far as I know, it is of Persian origin, and came to India through the influence of the Mughal dynasty. As chili peppers weren’t a thing in India back then, this is spiced with peppercorns and khade masale, whole spices, and such it is quite mellow and lets the star ingredient shine through, which is lamb. Great glorious lamb. I suggest finding the best lamb you can, on the bone, because if anything, this dish is a lamb curry where the base for the sauce is rice. Yakhni is a Persian-origin word that means stock or broth, and that is precisely what you need to make first, and then cook the rice in it. I’ve always wanted to cook a Yakhni Pulao, and it’s come out exactly like I thought it would. This is quite different to the way we make biryani here in Hyderabad, and it’s quite delicious! ~Adi

Prep time: 15 minutes

Cook time: 2 hours

Ingredients

500g lamb on the bone, cut into large-ish chunks

1 tsp cumin

1 inch piece of ginger, whole

5 cloves of garlic, crushed slightly

1 inch stick of cinnamon, broken into bits

3-4 green cardamoms

4-5 cloves

2 black cardamoms

8-10 black peppercorns, whole

2-3 bay leaves

5 medium onions, sliced thinly

a few strands of saffron, infused in 2-3 tbsp milk

2 cups rice (to serve 4), use basmati

4 cups water

4 tbsp yoghurt, beaten till smooth

ghee

1 tsp garam masala

2-3 drops kewda essence (optional)

 

Method

• Soak the rice for about thirty minutes.
• Place the ginger, garlic, cinnamon, cardamoms, cloves, and bay leaves in a cheesecloth or a tea-egg, and seal it to make a bouquet garni. Heat some oil in a pressure cooker, and add the cumin. Let it sputter, before adding the meat, and immediately the water, and the bouquet garni. Seal this and pressure cook until tender.
• Fry some onions till golden- to biryani-brown. Mix the garam masala and the yoghurt together.
• Depressurise the cooker, extract the meat and set aside. Strain the stock – the yakhni, and add water until it measures up to 4 cups again.
• Heat some ghee in a large pot, add the meat and 3/4 of the fried onions to it, before adding the yoghurt-garam masala mixture to this, and stirring to coat the meat, making sure you don’t break it up.
• Fry for a couple of minutes, before straining the rice, and adding it to the pot. Add the 4 cups-worth of yakhni to this, and stir to make sure everything is evenly mixed and distributed.
• Place a flat lid on the pot and weigh it down (I used a heavy stone mortar) to seal it. Cook on a medium heat for 5 minutes, until it slowly boils, then decrease the heat to the lowest it will go until the rice is cooked, and has completely absorbed the water.
• Finish with the saffron-infused milk, and garnish with the leftover onions.

 

Saj’s Chicken Curry

This is a recipe recommended to me by my Sri Lankan friend Saj, and I have to say I would readily recommend this curry to anyone who wants to make a quick little curry and they want it to be absolutely fabulous while relatively lazy. ~Adi

Prep time: 20 minutes

Cook time: 10 minutes

Ingredients

450g chicken, boneless (I prefer breast as this is a quick cook)

2 medium onions, sliced

2 mild green chilies, chopped (use 1 if strong)

4 – 5 curry leaves

1 inch piece of Pandan leaf*, chopped

1 inch piece of lemongrass, chopped

1 tsp ginger-garlic paste

1 – 2 tsp red chili powder

1/2 tsp roasted curry powder**

1/2 tsp turmeric

1/2 tsp freshly ground black pepper

1/2 tsp mustard seeds, crushed

1 tbsp vinegar

salt to taste

coconut oil

 

Method

• Trim and prep the chicken; cut it into large-ish chunks. Mix the chili powder, curry powder, pepper, turmeric, lemongrass, and a teaspoon of salt with a good amount of coconut oil to make a paste. Coat the chicken in this paste and set aside.
• Fry the sliced onions, ginger-garlic paste, green chilies, curry leaves, and the pandan in some coconut oil until golden brown. Add the crushed mustard seeds, cover, and simmer for a few minutes.
• Add the chicken, add the vinegar, some salt, and stir. Add your desired amount of water (or none at all if you want), cover, and cook till tender. Serve over scented rice.

 

Notes

*If you can’t find pandan leaves, serve your curry with basmati rice.

**You could substitute with garam masala, but roasted curry powder is typically Sri Lankan, and absolutely delightful.

Dahi Vada

An interesting dish endemic to and popular in India (as far as I know), dahi vada consists of Vadas, and dahi, yoghurt.

Vadas are made by grinding washed urad dal into a batter, sometimes with a bit of rice, and then deep-frying this batter. The vadas are then soaked in a bit of water and then quickly transferred to yoghurt, where they’re let to soak for a few minutes to saturate them, and then topped with any combination of toppings including coriander leaves, black pepper, chat masala, red chili powder, etc. This dish is definitely a very refreshing and satisfying summer treat.

Vada Pav

A vegetarian fast food dish incredibly popular in and synonymous with the city of Mumbai, Maharashtra, vada pav is deceptively simple in appearance.

An aloo fry similar to the one I wrote about earlier, consisting of boiled and semi-mashed potatoes fried with a tarka of spices is taken and rolled into a ball, before being coated in a batter based on chickpea flour (besan). This ball is then deep-fried to make the vada. A pav bun is taken and split almost completely in half, then lined with green chutney (mint and green chili, with some spices and tamarind) and red chutney (mostly tamarind and jaggery-based, syrupy, tangy, and spicy), and then stuffed with the vada. This is then smushed a little bit and served in anything from a piece of newspaper (if you’re in the backstreets) or a ceramic plate (in a posh restaurant), you choose.

The other disc-like things in front of the vada pav are patra, which I’ll write about later.

Naan

Naan, also referred to as naan bread outside India, is an umbrella term for a family of leavened and oven-baked flatbreads staple to the northern parts of South Asia (North India, Pakistan, etc.). The word naan itself means bread in Persian, so it pretty much does what it says on the tin.

Typically, naan is made of maida (refined/AP flour), and is leavened using yeast or a bread starter (a bit of the previous batch of dough), and then flattened by hand into a roughly triangular shape, before being stuck to the walls of a tandoor, an extremely hot clay oven. The bread cooks in less than a minute, and it’s detached and extracted by means of long hooks.

Naan goes really well with basically everything. Literally any curry in India would go great with a naan. Another way to spice up your naan is to butter it (butter naan, duh), or to actually spice it, either when you’re kneading the dough, or in some melted ghee, or just sprinkled over top.

Traditional naan is to be made only in a tandoor, because the smoky charry flavour of coal-fired bread has no real parallels, but people still make naan at home in electric ovens and even on pans (tawa naan).

The recipe below doesn’t use yeast, but instead uses baking soda to leaven the bread. It’s a bit quicker, a bit more convenient, but if you honestly want great naan, you should go to your local tandoori shop and get some from them! ~Team

Prep time: 2-3 hours

Cook time: 10 minutes

Ingredients

450g flour (preferably AP/maida)

250ml yoghurt

1 tsp baking soda

Salt, to taste

Water (~200ml)

Method

• Combine the flour, baking soda, yoghurt, and some water to form a smooth and supple dough.
• Cover it with a damp cloth and let it prove for 2-3 hours.
• After it has risen, cut it into small portions, each about the size of a cricket ball (sorry, Americans).
• Roll the balls out by patting and stretching them into a roughly oblong or triangular shape.
• Moisten the surface with water and put the naan in a tandoor, or a preheated oven, as hot as it goes.
• Depending on how hot it is, the naan should cook in anywhere from 50 seconds to two minutes.
• Take the naan out, brush with butter, and serve hot.

Kadhai Murgh

This recipe is incredibly simple, and at the same time unbelievably delicious. I found it in Madame Doreen Hassan’s amazing book Saffron and Pearls. It’s a collection of great Hyderabadi recipes, and I’m pretty sure it’s going to make many appearances on CurryCo because of the sheer quality and beauty of each recipe.

As for kadhai murgh itself, the name of the dish comes from the traditional method of cooking murgh (chicken) in a kadhai, an Indian wok-like frying pan. I’m not sure what difference it makes, but if I had to gamble, I’d put my chips in the fact that kadhais are much much faster than normal pots with heavy bottoms. If you do make this in a heavy pot, make sure you get it super hot in the initial stages, you don’t want to soften the onions on a low heat, you’ll wait ages and ages, and end up with sticky brown bits.

This curry took me about thirty minutes from start to end, counting the five minutes it took me to make myself a cup of coffee before I began (I use a Bialetti, they take a while). We had it for dinner with roties and a pseudo-CTM that father made (recipe coming soon), and the leftovers I microwaved this morning and shredded the chicken to make the perfect filling for a breakfast sandwich. All in all a great curry, incredibly versatile, and just very very good. ~Adi

Prep time: 10 minutes

Cook time: ~30 minutes

Ingredients

500g boneless chicken (I used breast, cut into mid-large cubes that later shrunk)

3 onions, sliced finely

3 – 4 medium tomatoes, chopped finely

3 – 4 green chilies, chopped finely (use less if you don’t want too much spice)

2 – 3 pods garlic, minced*

1/2 inch ginger, chopped finely*

1 tsp red chili powder

coriander leaves

Method

• Heat some oil in a kadhai or a pot, get it hot. Add the sliced onions and fry them off, moving them almost constantly until they’re soft and almost golden-brown.
• Add the ginger and garlic, cook them until the raw aroma goes away, and add the tomatoes. Scrape off the bits stuck to the bottom, reduce the heat to medium-low, and cook this mixture, adding minuscule amounts of water to make sure nothing sticks. Be sure to add some salt to help the tomatoes cook.
• Once the tomatoes are amalgamated and melted beautifully into the sauce, add the chicken, green chilies, and red chili powder; combine. Cover this and cook till the chicken is tender. Add some coriander leaves just before it’s done, and wait for the rogan (oils) to come to the top. You’ll see it. Serve, optionally garnished with a few more coriander leaves.**

Notes

* You can substitute the garlic and ginger for 1 tsp ginger-garlic paste.

** I actually ran out of coriander when I made this, hence the non-corianderiness of the above picture. Welp.

Thali

Thali technically means plate, and the earliest evidence of the usage of plates in South Asia was the Indus Valley Civilization, ages and ages ago. These days, though, thali is a classic South Asian food style consisting of several dishes on one platter. Indian food custom states that the six major flavours – sweetness, saltiness, bitterness, sourness, spice, and astringency – should all be a part of a thali. The specific contents of a thali vary from region to region, often from house to house or restaurant to restaurant, but it’s safe to say that any food-loving South Asian would start salivating at the sight of one any time past noon.

This particular thali consists of white rice in the middle katori, and going clockwise from 12 o’clock: dal fry, sambhar, gulab jamun, pulao, sliced onions, paneer masala, and chhole (chickpea curry).

Jeera Chaanch

Goodness, it’s really really hot out. Nothing, though, like a refreshing jeera chaanch to refuel! 💙 I could drink a litre of this stuff (and I might just – someday you’ll find me hooked up to a tub of the stuff).

Chicken Country Captain

Now I’m not really sure what the origins of this curry are. It appears that versions of it are quite popular in the USA, though the origins of it are definitely Indian. It’s incredibly simple, and the recipe I found is from The Indian Cookery Book (ca. 1900s), straight out of the British Raj. You know me, I love food with history attached to it, because that’s all stories that unfold on your taste buds and that, to me, is the best part.

Country Captain in its popular form is a mild, sweetish, classic Indian chicken curry, but the old recipe shows it off to be a simpler dish for fast and easy cooking, and really is probably one of the simplest, yet tastiest dishes I’ve ever tried out.

Interestingly, Cyrus Todiwala apparently presented HM Queen Elizabeth II a version of Country Captain as part of her Diamond Jubilee Celebrations way back in 2012. Well, whatever – it’s still a classic dish, still somewhat popular in the Anglo-Indian circles in India, but somehow caught on in America. ~Adi.

Prep time: 10 minutes

Cook time: 30 minutes

Ingredients

250g chicken, on or off the bone

1/2 tsp red chili powder

4 medium onions, sliced finely

1/4 tsp turmeric

Ghee

Salt to taste

…seriously, that’s it.

Method

• Heat the ghee in a pot, then fry the sliced onions until they’re just on the verge of late golden to early brown. Take them out and set aside.
• Next, add a tiny amount of ghee to the pot and fry off the chili and turmeric powders until they’re not raw anymore. Add the chicken with a bit of salt to help it along and fry off until it’s almost cooked, adding minuscule amounts of water now and again to deglaze the pan.
• Add the onions back into the pot and combine, season, and cover until the chicken is cooked. Serve.

The original recipe was a little bit mad, and I’ve adapted it into this one, which I think is a tiny bit more sensible. Also, one last detail is the fact that the original author said it should be served as chicken pieces with onions strewed over them, but I prefer this combined form. Makes it really holistic.

For reference, here’s the original condiment proportions:

Two chittacks or four ounces of ghee, half a teaspoonful of ground chilies, one teaspoonful of salt, a quarter of a teaspoonful of ground turmeric, and twenty onions, cut up lengthways into fine slices.

Like I said, a bit mad. ~Adi

Khichdi

The ultimate comfort food, Khichdi is derived from the Sanskrit word khiccā which means a dish made with rice and pulses. Generally, red and yellow lentils are used. Cardamom, cinnamon, cumin and turmeric along with onions and ginger-garlic paste are the basic spices used. Khichdi is served with khatta or chutney and different kinds of fried papad. It’s almost like the chicken soup of Indian food, if I may.