Tuesday, January 22, 2013

Visiting the North Indian cuisine from my kitchen

Annoyed about so much discussion and reading about Indian cuisine, but so little experience, I decided to start my own culinary tour of some local dishes. 

The first try was dilly style palak paneer, considered a popular vegetarian dish in North India, common to both Pakistani and Indian cuisine. Paneer is the tender Indian cheese, very sweet and a real pleasure for the palate. The small chunks of cheese are covered in a combination of fresh spinach leaves, butter, onion, tomatoes and a lot of aromatic spices that unfortunatelly I cannot name exactly. It is not considered very hot, but after two seconds you will feel a wave of hot temperature bursting from your mouth. You do not throw out flames; not yet. Most probably my big mistake is that I did not know that I may need some yogurt dressing or a simple boiled rice pr even better, a chunk of Indian bread for diminishing the hotness. 

Without moving from North India, I switched the next day to a different (still vegetarian) dish, also based on paneer - mutter (or mattar, according to some prononciations) paneer. It is less spicey that the palak one. It has: peas, tomatoes and a bunch of spices that I do not know too much about. Some recipes include a local type of potato, but I did not feel something was missing out of my dish. If you would love to taste it in a local restaurant, you may be offered some Indian bread on the side. 


Both dishes can be prepared at home, but I would prefer a basic training in portioning and calculating the right concentration of spices. 




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