FAQ for uk.food+drink.indian Newsgroup
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The Questions

• Advance Preparation

  1. Are there any quick ways of making curries? The recipes I have mostly seem to take quite a while to prepare. I don't want anything fancy, just something to cook after coming home from work.

• Bitter Taste

  1. Any curry that I try and make that has a significant amount of yoghurt in it seems to turn out tasting very bitter.
     Is this how it is meant to be, or am I buying the wrong sort of yoghurt (bog standard supermarket low fat natural yoghurt)?
  2. I make lots of different curries at home but they all tend to be bitter (whether or not I have added yoghurt), I used to add sugar to take away the biterness.

• Chillies

  1. Do you people always "gut" your chillis and dispose of the seeds, or is the reverse true?
     To burn or not to burn, that is the question
  2. We could do with some tips to sanitise the hands after chopping chillis.
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• Chicken

  1. There doesn't seem to be much flavour in chicken pieces when I cook without marinating.
  2. There's more flavour when chicken is cooked on the bone, but what about those horrid gristly bits?
  3. I've never used chicken on the bone for curry, only breast. Do you leave the skin on too?
  4. Is it feasible/worthwhile to curry a chicken, whole?

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• Ghee

  1. What is ghee?
  2. How do I use ghee?
  3. I don't use ghee all the time, when should I use it?
  4. Does it make much difference to the taste (are curries generally richer for it...in particular masalas)?
  5. Don't anyone try to convince me this stuff cooks up much better than it smells. It might, but I ain't trying it ever, ever again. I'd rather eat mushy lard.
  6. Is Ghee that bad for burning? I think the worst of burnable(?) matter from butter is removed by the making of ghee... What is left can withstand quite high temperatures without burning !

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• Mustard Oil

  1. I have come across mustard oil in several recipes but have never seen it. Is it a home-made formulation or something available in the shops?
  2. I bought a bottle of mustard oil to use in cooking - but it has "For external use only" on the label. Is it alright to cook with it?
  3. I bought a bottle ages ago called "Mustarda", and I've only just noticed that the bottle says it's a mixture of rape seed oil, mustard oil and colouring.
     Was I sold a pup?

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• Panir

  1. What is panir?
  2. How do I use panir?
  3. Is it supposed to taste of anything? I bought some ready made paneer and last night made mattar paneer with it. The paneer fried without falling apart, much to my surprise, I'd expected it to be as tricky as Tofu, and the texture was lovely, but it seemed to have no flavour at all. The overall dish was good but all the taste came from the other ingredients. Is it meant to be like that?

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• Tandoor

  1. Is it possible to import a tandoor oven for home use from India or elsewhere?
  2. What is a suitable alternative to a tandoor?

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The Answers

• Advance Preparation

  1. A comment from Mandeep Cheema:

     I can only speak for myself and my family, there are a number of festivals where complex curries are produced which can be both time consuming and expensive. These type of meals are still produced on special occasions but not everyday. I suppose it can be best compared with the English diet where you would spend a lot of time and money on a Sunday roast dinner, but during the week you would have pasta or sausage and mash, maybe a pie.
     These type of meals do not require the preparation or cost of a big Sunday lunch. The recipes I have come from notes written down, some are quite old and have been copied over many times, evolving no doubt in the process. Some come from Indian cookbooks.
     Everybody seems suprised when I comment that I sometimes cook from Indian recipe books, they seeem to think that because I am Indian I am born instantly with the an ability to knock up a Rogan Josh or Chicken Pilau, if that were the case it would be applicable to the whole of the human race and nobody would have heard of Delia Smith!

     Two of Mandeep's recipes are on the Curry Sauces page.
     
  2. You could also consider the method below:
     A paragraph from Camellia Panjabi's "50 great curries of india"
     

     What many Indian working women do nowadays is to make a fried onion ginger, garlic, tomato and spice masala mixture (daag) and keep it in the refrigerator for up to two weeks, or longer in the freezer. Whenever they want to make a curry they heat a few spoonfuls of it with some oil, add the meat, chicken, fish or vegetables, and sauté for a few minutes, add some water and with no further effort they have a curry. Even when cooking a 'dry' vegetable, they put a few spoons of mixture in a wok, with maybe just a quarter cup of water, then add the vegetables and cook over a low heat.

  3. Rather than cook one dish in bulk and freeze portions try this Preparation Chain.
  4. Take a look at Wazza's Variations based on flavoured oil and homemade vegetable stock.

• Bitter Taste

  1. With yoghurt:
     1. Yes! I do not like low fat yoghurts because of this bitterness. I use whole milk yoghurt either set or normal from the local asian supermarket.
     2. Curries containing Yoghurt should have a bit of a tang but certainly shouldn't be bitter. Although I don't use it myself, I'd guess that Yoghurt might go bitter if overheated, so are you putting it in at the beginning when things are frying rather than boiling? That might be the cause.
  2. Without yoghurt:
     1. I think it was suggested in a thread on a similar subject - be very careful with turmeric. Over cooking it, when you fry the spices, can burn it, and burned turmeric has a very bitter taste. I always just stir it in for a second or two at the end of the frying, just before I add whatever liquid I am using.
     2. You might want to watch how much fenugreek you stick into the curry. I have seen recipes (and TV cooks) chucking massive amounts in ... they can make things very bitter. In most of my curries or in dahl, I use at most, two or three seeds.
     3. Fenugreek leaves can also be the cause of a bitter tast, whether dried or fresh they are best soaked for a while and the water discarded before adding to the dish.
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• Chillies

  1. Deseeding Chillis

     1. I think the reverse is true. you don't have to use many chillies if you don't want it too hot. But gutting them and disposing off the seeds ! It's like opening your wallet and chucking all the money out. Mind you, there are some recipes that call for such an action.
     2. I usually get as many out as I can be bothered to.
     3. I don't usually bother.
     4. Personally I like the taste of chilli peppers so I buy the mildest ones I can find, take out the seeds & put loads of them in to get the maximum taste for the required heat.
     5. I usually gut them because the seeds are hotter than the flesh, also they do not look as nice as the flesh, if you care about appearance. It all depends how hot you like things.
     6. I reckon most of the heat is in the pith, so you need to do more than remove the seeds if you don't want it too hot. I rather like fresh chilli "heat" (more than I do the heat from chilli powder) so I tend to leave the seeds in, unless making a paste with them, or if for some other reason they would spoil the texture.
     7. One tip I learned from a friend, is when we are grinding chillies in the grinder, to put a bit of oil and most seeds will be ground too. I do this method when I am grinding red chillies for chilli chicken or similar dishes.

  2. Precautions

     1. Mine is to do the washing up; immersing the hands for several minutes in a bowl of hot water with washing-up detergent seems to do the trick.
     2. At Leith's cookery school they teach you how to chop a chilli very finely without ever touching it. Hold it on the chopping board with a fork and attack it with a sharp knife. Halving and seeding it takes a bit of practise but the actual chopping is surprisingly easy.
     3. Right, here's the easy way:
        You know those little metal hand-washing things you can buy in any supermarket for removing Onion smell? Well, they also work on Garlic and chilli. Something to do with catalysing a reaction between the oils involved and the water (or whatever).

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• Chicken

  1. This is what I have observed about the difference in my chicken curry taste when I cook with a whole chicken cut into pieces and with chicken fillets (boneless and back of chicken).
     Different recipes calls for different parts of chicken meat to be used, yes. For a simple chicken curry, I find that when I cook a whole chicken cut into bite sized pieces and cooked, it tastes much much better with the juices from the bones coming out during cooking, as compared to a chicken curry using the same ingredients but by using boneless chicken meat.
     I do use boneless chicken meat for other different types of Indian cooking, however when it comes to chicken curry I always use a whole chicken. Only once I used boneless chicken meat and I never liked the end result. Bland, tasteless and just not nice, for me I mean.
     It's very easy to cut up a whole chicken. Anyone can do it in 15 minutes. Only thing extra I do is take time to remove the bloody parts that is attached to the back of the chicken. If I don't remove that bloody part I find there's a kind of smell (cooked blood smell) in my chicken curry. I don't like that at all. I have a sensitive nose to smell.
     For me, I don't mind doing this extra 15 minutes of cutting up the chicken coz my chicken curry has always tasted nice.
     So, my opinion is that the juices given out by the different parts of the chicken in the process of cooking a simple chicken curry makes much of the difference.
  2. I think you're right about the flavour, a lot of people don't like any bones or gristly bits in their food. A good compromise is to buy the whole chicken, fillet the breasts and legs, yourself (which would usually cost as much as the whole bird anyway). Then boil the rest of the bird, together with giblets, for an hour or more, to make a really rich chicken stock containing all the flavour you find lacking. Strain this (I usually include a lot of the meat that's fallen off the bone by now too) and add it back into your curry dish. Generally, I find I make enought stock from one chicken to sufficently enhance three or four dishes. Freeze whats left in ice-cube trays for re-use next time.
  3. I don't use skin for my curries. I do leave them on when I am making fried chicken wings.
     I do remove the neck and the tail part of the chicken. I was told to make a slightly bigger cut there because it's supposed to contain some chicken glands that if added on to make curries, it would taste bitter .........
     I don't add the innards, liver, heart and kidney. And finally I do remove the end parts of the chicken wings.
     I do remove the chunkier meats from the breast and when I am serving this dish I remove the rib-cages.
  4. I cannot think of a single reason to leave the chicken entire, not nearly so much flavor enhancement that way. You should always, however, use the entire chicken hacked up. (unless making some very delicate thing that wants only the denuded white meat) Buy a cheap and sturdy Chinese cleaver and go at it. This whole business of removing skin and bones drives me nuts. It must have been the invention of one of those nightmare nutritionists bent on making us all dislike our food so much that we won't eat more than the allotted 1/2 cup portions. The flavors released by frying the chunks of bone-in meat with skin is commensurate with the release in toasting spices. Go ahead, be brave, make nicely splintered real meat chunks and you'll be convinced.

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• Ghee

  1. Ghee is clarified butter. It is a staple ingredient of Indian cooking and used in similar ways to olive oil in Italian cuisine.
  2. Ghee should be used only for special occassions, and only if you like the smell and taste of it. Never use it as a substitute to other oils . Yes you are quite right to avoid it most of the time.
  3. It does give a rich flavour and enhances some of the spices in some dishes but not all as a rule. For instance on special occassions Biryani is traditionally cooked in Ghee and the rice is usually Basmathi, and this dish is much richer than if it was cooked in ordinary rice and oil.
  4. Don't be put off though...get yerself along to a good indian/ethnic grocer and buy yourself a can of butter ghee. I think you'll find it to be a whole different story, butter ghee has a lovely nutty flavour...and actually smells quite fragrant when cooking.
  5. This is true to a point. Many of the impurities that make butter go brown at relatively modest temperatures are indeed removed, although the fat that's left will still reach smoking point earlier than many vegetable oils (like groundnut, my favourite).

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• Mustard Oil

  1. Using
     1. This really is the one for Indian cooking in my experience. Raw and during cooking it is extremely pungent but once cooked it is quite sweet.
        You can buy it from Indian grocery stores.
     2. Yes mustard oil does make a difference to the taste of dishes. I can't report on its use in Chicken Tikka, being veggie, but can vouch that it is pungent enough to remain discernible in the taste of quite highly spiced dishes.
  2. Now the disconcerting thing is, that all mustard oil sold in UK is marked with the warning "for external use only". It is the law that mustard oil cannot be sold without this warning, although many people, including me, have eaten it and lived to tell the tale. There was a big scare about mustard oil in 1998, when people in Delhi died from eating contaminated oil, but it was the contaminant that did the harm, not the oil.
     The only suggestion I've found about grounds for not eating it generally is an assertion that "it contains allyl isothiocyanate and erucic acid, both of which have been implicated in some health problems". If you have eaten wholegrain mustard, then you have eaten the oil and therefore these substances.
  3. Purity
     1. Mustard oil in the bottle looks like any other oil, except for its bright yellow colour. I assume it is made in the same way as any other oil from seeds, such as rape seed oil. There aren't any bits of mustard seeds left. The bottles I've bought in Rusholme in Manchester list only mustard oil as the ingredient, so no infusions.
     2. Mustard and rape are closely related but rapeseed oil has little flavour or colour. However the label made no claim to be "mustard oil", despite the name of the product, and it was a main ingredient.

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• Panir

  1. PANIR [Soft milk cheese] Bring 1 pint of milk to the boil, stirring a little. When the milk rises add one tablespoon of lemon juice; mix well; and as soon as the lumps are formed, strain through a fine cloth and press with a heavy weight so as to squeeze out all the whey.
  2. Favourite combinations of mine are muttar paneer, made with garden peas and methi (fenugreek) leaves, or fried paneer added to an aromatic keema dish.
  3. Anyway, bought paneer doesn't have much flavour of its own, but when fried up like this does acquire some in the process and will readily absorb other flavours.

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• Tender

  1. I recently read a piece (I believe it was by Heston Blumental, the Guardian's new-ish chef writer who is big on the science of cooking.) that the reason why lemon and pineapple juice are so good for tenderising meat is that they contain a specific acid that is particularly good at breaking down the protein.
     I have tried pineapple juice (not a favourite of mine) on mutton and found it to be really effective and, surprisingly, didn't leave any taste that I could detect.
  2. I tend to cook the meat in a little water for a great long time if I want it tender - folks don't do this so much anymore because there aren't as many cheap cuts of meat around and we're all used to being scolded for overcooking. :-)
  3. Cook it in the slow cooker and start it at 10am for dinner at 8pm. Added bonus - the smell will drive you and all your neighbours mad all day. And it leaves you free to prepare loads of lovely stuff to go with it later in the day.

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• Tandoor

  1. The Tandoor Site
  2. I use a lidded gas BBQ as a tandoori substitute. Leave it on full power with lid closed for 30 minutes and it gets very, very hot inside. Slap naan onto the bars and shut the lid again - cooks in around 1 minute and has the puffed up bubbles just as it should.
     This method also works fine for tandoori chicken, or even better, tandoori quail skinned and slashed but left whole.

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