By Raphael Samson and Innah Pallarca
In this session of Asian Cuisine, we
learned how to cook food with lots of spices in one dish! Your tongue and
nostrils must be strong because you will experience how the spiciness of each
Indian dish heightens every bite. Read along to feel (at least by reading) how
their food taste.
South Asian cuisine focuses on India
and Pakistan. They are known for different spices they use for their food.
During the earlier years, India influenced other cuisines through trading. They
traded spices and other ingredients common to them such as turmeric, coriander,
ginger and cumin.
"...the cuisine has many recipes
that feature vegetable based dishes. Vegetarian dishes are often paired with
curry causes that can be very spicy." An example of a vegetable curry dish
is Aubergine in Pickling Sauce. In this dish, the roasted spices are infused in
the aubergines/eggplants then submerged to Bahaar, a pickling sauce made of
cumin, dried chillies, onion seeds, mustard seed and oil.
Preparing the
pickling sauce
Another example of a vegetable dish
from this cuisine is Vegetable Samosa. Samosa is a baked/fried pastry that is
usually filled with savoury meat or vegetable served as an hors d’oveures,
quite similar to our own Empanada. For this recipe, we used potatoes and peas
for the vegetable filling.
Vegetable
Samsosa
In my opinion, Beef Balti was the
spiciest dish served on that day. This is a curry-based dish where in the
spices are stir-fried with onions. The spice mix will then be transferred to a
food processor to further smoothen its texture. When the curry’s texture is
achieved, it will be added to youghurt and then stir-fried into the beef. This
dish is incredibly spicy!
Stir-fried
spices in the food processor
Balti Beef
Pork Vindaloo is another curry-based
dish from India. This dish is hot and tangy but not as spicy as the others.
Vindaloo was derived from a Portuguese dish called Carne de Vinha d' Alhos. In
this Indian version, the wine is substituted with vinegar.
Pork Vindaloo
Indian cuisine is known for being bold
when it comes to the usage of spices and flavors. But this particular Indian
dish is a bit different from the others. Chicken Tandoori is a popular Indian
dish marinated in spices and yogurt then grilled and baked. The dish got its
name from the cylindrical clay oven, Tandoor, used for cooking it. This meat
dish’s spiciness is very mild and has a smoky flavour from paprika.
A dish from the south of India is
Spicy Shrimp. The shrimp is stir-fried with the spices and chillies. We
adjusted the spiciness of this dish. The original recipe requires it to be very
spicy.
For the starch that will go with the
main dishes, we made Kitcheri. Kitcheri is a dish consisting of two grains, the
rice and the lentils. We cooked the rice in a pilaf way for it to have flavour.
It is then fried with cinnamon powder, garlic and peppercorns. Unfortunately,
our kitcheri became sticky because we only have short grain rice.
Lastly, the dessert and beverag our class made was Rosewater Pudding and
Lassi. Both of these cleanse the pallette from the strong flavor of the appetizers
and main course. Lassi is a drink composed of yogurt, milk and mango. It is
similar to mango shake. We had a problem with Rosewater Pudding because of the
gelatin we have. It didn’t set because the gelatin was too weak.
The South Asian cuisine is as rich and
diverse as its region itself. How they use their spices reflects the dimension
of their culture.
