So I thought I?d share with you how this came about??
My wife works with an Asian lady whose mother was visiting her. Knowing that I liked curries, her mother invited me to her house, a couple of times, to watch her prepare a multitude of curries and side dishes. Her recipes and methods are largely her own and/or handed down by her mother. She writes nothing down and does not measure the ingredients. Her favourite expression appeared to be ?and a little bit of salt?? meanwhile heaping yet another teaspoon of salt in, with a slight shrug of her shoulders and with sure signs of embarrassment!
Now, this lovely lady was so generous that she not only allowed me to steal about 5 hours of her time, each time I visited her, but she also insisted that I ate enough to feed a horse and that I also take a whole bag full of curries (hence the ruck sack) and side dishes home with me! What a darling she is!
Well, suffice to say that, every time I go near my ruck sack, I am greeted with a most gorgeous aroma of curries that bears a strong (if not exact) resemblance to ?the smell??..ONE WEEK LATER!...
??AND the smell fills the whole room!
Obviously, this left me puzzling how she achieves such an unmistakeable and lingering smell to her curries. You see, this lovely lady uses the most basic of ingredients and cooks with, what I presume to be, a typical traditional Indian style. She uses no curry base and was very intrigued (and a little perplexed) to hear that BIRs use such a curry base as a starting point.
So how does she create this magical aroma to her curries? Let me use her ?chicken curry? as an example, sufficient to feed about 6 people:
- 12 or so chicken drumsticks (rubbed with some tumeric powder and salt to ?neutralise the smell?)
- Various whole spices (2 star anise, 1 inch cinnamon, 5 cloves, 10 dry curry leaves)
2 Onions (chopped) - 1 tablespoon garlic paste (bottled)
- 1 tablespoon ginger paste (bottles)
- 2 carrots and 4 tomatoes (chopped) ? the carrots are really ?fillers? more than anything
2 coriander ROOTS - 6 TABLESPOONS of ?Baba?s? curry powder (for ?meat?, ?chicken?, ?fish?, etc)
- 3 TABLESPOONS of chilli powder. Boy, does she like ?em hot and spicy! This also gave the dish and oil a very rich red colour
- 4 par-boiled potatoes (quartered) ? again, these are really ?fillers?
- Lots of salt (maybe 2 tsp)
And that?s basically it! So was the smell from the ingredients? Maybe?in part at least. But clearly it is what she did with them that made the difference! This is what I observed regarding her cooking technique:
- She got a wok smoking hot
- She added plenty of cheap vegetable oil (sometimes ghee for other dishes) which sizzled as it went into the hot wok
- She left it, full blast (on a gas stove) until the oil was smoking ? to a point where I wanted to reach for the fire blanket!
She then added the ingredients (in the above order) and did some interesting things:
- She cooked everything on full blast ? whereas I would have been tempted to reduce the heat for fear of burning the spices
- She left the ingredients largely undisturbed (i.e. up the sides if the carbon steel wok) as they simmered and spattered away ? whereas I would have been tempted to turn them for fear of burning them
- She left things simmering and spattering away for reasonably long times ? whereas I would have been tempted to stop cooking
- She scraped any ?burnt/fused? bits off the bottom of the wok?muttering something about this being good stuff?
So, my conclusion was that, whereas the ingredients clearly have a significant effect on the final taste, this lovely lady achieved ?the smell? in her curries (or something closely resembling it) by using the above techniques to fuse the ingredients (much like CP and Andy advocate in the ?fusion? techniques that they described).
I know that, from now on, I will do the following (particularly when frying the spices and other preliminary ingredients):
- Be far less cautious about using much higher cooking temperatures
- Cook things, on full blast, for much longer
- Leave things undisturbed, without turning, for much longer
Sorry to be long winded! I hope you?re still awake!
Regards,
