More than just curry

Move over, fancy expensive dinners. Home-cooked dinner is the new cool. Cooking in your own kitchen is a great way to unwind and de-stress; it can be therapeutic, provided you don’t have Gordon Ramsay hovering over you.

With the popularity of TV shows like Master chef (and of course, the internet), you can now get easy access to recipes from around the world. Indian food, like we said in an earlier blog, is quite diverse and versatile, in a sense. You can tweak the level of spices and ingredients to arrive at a taste that is more suitable to your palate. But you need to have a functional knowledge of spices and basic cooking techniques for your culinary experiments to work. A wrong blend of spices can spell disaster.

Dal Makhani

Dal MakhaniToday, we look at a traditional and popular recipe from Punjab, a state in north India. The Punjabis are known for their zest for life and their rich food with generous dollops of ghee, cream and butter. You could use alternatives to cream – say yoghurt or skimmed milk, for instance, if you are health-conscious, but the Punjabi mother would grudgingly disapprove of your decision to do so. Dal makhani is made of dal (lentils) and makhani (butter). To make this recipe, you will need the following:

Ingredients

  • Whole black lentils (about 300 gram)
  • Butter – 3 tablespoons
  • Ginger – chopped – 2 tablespoons
  • Garlic – chopped – 1 tablespoon
  • Onion – finely chopped – 1 large
  • Tomatoes – finely chopped – 3
  • Cream – 1 cup
  • Salt and red chilli powder – as per taste

Method

This recipe requires some planning, because the lentils have to soak in water for about 8 hours or so. Place the soaked lentils in a pressure cooker along with about 5 cups of water, salt and chilli powder. If you want it mild, you could even omit the chillies completely. Let this cook in the pressure cooker up to about 9 to ten whistles. The idea is to overcook it and make it really soft.

Once this is done, heat some butter in a thick-bottomed pan. As the butter melts, add the chopped ginger and garlic. In goes the onions. Fry them all until they are start becoming pink. The next step is to add the tomatoes. Alternatively, you could puree the tomatoes in a blender, and then add them. This will give the dish a smoother texture. Add a wee bit of salt and chilli powder to the ginger-garlic-onion-tomato mixture that’s cooking. Now transfer this cooked mixture to the cooked dal in the pressure cooker. Fold it in gently. Now for the best part. The cream, of course. Add it to the dal and tomato mixture in the cooker and stir it in. Garnish it with freshly chopped coriander leaves.

Dal makhani is usually served piping hot with steamed basmati (a type of long-grained rice) rice or a flatbread such as roti or naan. So set up one of our Satara dining tables and tuck in to this delicious comfort food.

Image: "Dal Makhani" by Charles Haynes - http://www.flickr.com/photos/haynes/1547098753/sizes/o/. Licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons - http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Dal_Makhani.jpg#mediaviewer/File:Dal_Makhani.jpg