Indian food: Awesome stuff!! But what is it all (and got recipes?)

Cafe Society
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This past year, my wife introduced me to some Indian foods, which I have absolutely come to enjoy–usually at lunchtime. Some of my favorites include Chana Masala, Dal Makhani, Sambar rice, Tomato rice, Tomato Dal, and other stuff. Usually, I get the ready-to-eat meals, which are good enough that I can eat in my truck at lunchtime (during class breaks).

My main question, is that nearly all of the ingredients list “chickpeas” or “lentils” as a staple ingredient, I’m noticing some similarities between the names of things and their ingredients. Purposefully, I’d like to learn what some of the names mean, that way I can get a better idea of what new foods I want to try.

Specifically, a handful of favorites:

Dal Tadka: Looks to be lentils with onion, tomatoes and spices. But I was under the impression that lentils were just small chickpeas. I don’t think it’s overly spicy (which can be adjusted by the cook, I’m sure). What is “Dal”, and what is the “Tadka”?

Aloo Mutter: Seems to be a stew of potatoes, peas, and onions. Again, what does “Aloo Mutter” mean?

Pav Bhaji: Tastes great, but from what I had seen (and the picture on the box) looks indistinguishable from Dal Tadka, other than the Dal Tadka may be whole lentils, while the Pav Bhaji looks like smooshed or mashed lentils.

Sambar Rice (or “Riz Au Sambar” which I think is French): Rice with dal, onions, tomatoes and carrots. What spices are in this one? This one in particular, I’m looking for anyone’s good recipe. Yeah, Google has recipes I’m sure, but I’d rather see if anyone’s got good ones, because we all know that Dopers make the best food.

Rajma Chawal: Red kidney beans and rice. Usually not so spicy, but I can add to it if I like. What does “Rajma” and “Chawal” mean?

Some of the spices I picked up are also a little strong, but I’m very tempted to use them in different things. I’ve got curry, cumin, and some other spices [sub]in my Florida flat. . . have to wait until I get back down there to clarify[/sub]. What can I use these with? Do they traditionally go with just rice? I like spicy food, but I hesitate to use some of the stuff I have lest I make it too “spicified” and can’t eat it (rare, but hey, three jalapenos in your mouth at once is kind of ill advised).

Anyway, I could use some help and discussion on this. I really do like the vegetarian foods, and want to try more–I just don’t fully understand what’s in all of the ones I have had in the past six months.

Tripler
Thanks in advance. . . and I love my wife!. [sub]She added this when I wasn’t looking, but that’s okay, 'cause it’s true.[/sub]

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Well, lentils are not small chickpeas, that I can tell you. They’re lentils - a pulse, but a different one. They’re particularly good because they cook quickly and don’t need to be soaked.

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Dal is just a generic word for a dish made of lentils, which is just a generic word for a variety of… well, lentils. I supposed dried beans is as good a definition as any. The more common types of dal (note that dal is both an ingredient and the dish itself) include chana dal, toor dal, masoor dal and moong dal. Tadka is a variety of spices briefly sizzled in hot oil or ghee and then poured over the cooked dal.

Aloo = potato
Mutter = peas

Simple, eh? Lots of Indian dishes are named for their ingredients, which makes it easy to know what you’re getting. Quite unlike, say, Toad-in-the-Hole.

Pav Bhaji is a fairly specific dish, not usually composed of lentils at all. It’s a mix of vegetables, including potatoes, peas, carrots and others, cooked together into a fairly well-done dish and then served with pav bread, which is lightly toasted in ghee. The best pav bhaji must be had on Juhu Beach in Mumbai, but I might be slightly biased here.

Sambhar is a dal-based dish, very south Indian rather than north Indian. Everyone traditionally makes their own sambhar powder, so there’s no standard recipe, but here’s one: http://www.tarladalal.com/recipe.asp?id=1663. Ingredients listed for the sambhar powder:

6 to 8 red chillies
1 tablespoon coriander seeds
1 teaspoon fenugreek seeds (methi)
1 tablespoon toovar dal (arhar)
1 tablespoon split Bengal gram (chana dal)
1 tablespoon split black gram (urad dal)
1 teaspoon turmeric powder (haldi)
1/2 teaspoon asafoetida (hing)
1 teaspoon oil

Rajma is red kidney beans (again, both the dried beans as well as the dish) and chawal is rice.

Indian cooking is very much based on the concept of adding various things by dint of “andaaz” - use your judgement. It drives my girlfriend mad when I try to explain what I’m putting in and how much, because it’s really a matter of what I feel is correct, rather than some predetermined quantity. It’s something you have to get a feel for, by experimenting. I suggest you either find recipes that seem interesting and just try them, or if you have any Indian friends, they could supply you with old recipes from the vaults of their grandmothers. I have one such here, from the vaults of my mother, which I really, really like:

Mutter Paneer
Ingredients
Paneer: 250 gms
Peas 250 gms(shelled)
Tomatoes 4/5 big
Ginger
Onion
coriander leaves
jeera (cumin), dalchini (cinnamon), cloves,badi elaichi (cardamom),
mustard seeds, haldi (turmeric), garam masala, chilli powder
oil,salt

Cut the paneer into small cubes
They can be put in straight BUT I think they taste better lightly browned.
Not deep fry but saute

For the gravy:
Tomatoes 4/5 big
Jeera : 1tbl spoon
Dalchini: 2 pieces / 1 inch each
Cloves :2
Badi Elaichi : 3 ( this is hard and dark brown in colour, the size of
a whole cashew nut put it in straight. If not available use
ordinary elaichi (4)
Ginger : 1 inch
Onion : 4

Grind all ingredients for gravy in blender. DO NOT ADD WATER

Preparation:
Heat 2 Tbl spoons oil in pan
Add 1 tsp jeera, 1tsp mustard seeds. 1/2 tsp haldi ( When it begins to
splutter turn down gas to simmer)
Add the gravy mixture.
Add 1 glass water
Add garam masala 1tsp
Add chilly powder 1tsp
Salt to taste
Stir on med. flame for 5-10 minutes
When gravy is cooked( one sign is that the oil separates) add paneer
Add coriander leaves.
Add peas finally
Stir for 2 minutes

I use frozen peas and tinned tomatoes, and they work equally well. If I’ve forgotten to translate something, let me know!

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Are these the frozen ready-to-eat meals? If so, the food is a thousand times better if it’s homemade or from a good restaurant. Dervorin’s recipes look great, but they start from absolute scratch. For some people, that can be intimidating. You can make Indian food much more easily if you start with prepared spice mixes or curry pastes. You may be able to find some of them in a good supermarket or, barring that, definitely in an Indian grocery store.

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“Saag” is spinach, I believe, as saag paneer is kind of a “creamed” spinach dish with paneer cheese in it. Oh, and lentils can be lots of different colors, served whole or split, skin on or removed, and sometimes things that really aren’t lentils at all are called that. Just think of them as being little beans and you’re set.

If you’re looking to make this at home, there are some great cookbooks out there. I’m most familiar with works by Julie Sahni (who has Classic Indian Cooking and Classic Indian Vegetarian and Grain Cooking) or Madhur Jaffrey. Jaffrey has a lot of books on the topic and on other nearby cuisines. If it all seems really complicated to you, check out one of Jaffrey’s “quick” cookbooks - I have one from her in which she minimizes extraneous ingredients and steps, but cautions that you’re going to be adding several spices to a dish or else what’s the point?

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You can also get decent sambar from packets (just add water and vegetables generally). These can be found in a world food store (or Indian grocer of course). To this husband of a south Indian Sambar is best with Idli, but those are kind of tricky to make at home (it’s like a fluffy steamed rice/dal disk). Fortunately my mother-in-law keeps me in stock. :slight_smile:

Can’t help but notice that your list doesn’t include dosa - if you can find a place that serves masala dosa you should try it out.

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I usually see it spelled “mattar paneer,” but either way, it’s one of the best things on earth. :slight_smile:

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: is hungry now :

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No, they’re “ready-to-eat” meals sealed in either a foil or plastic packet. My wife introduced me to them for the convenience of lunching in the truck, and their potential spiciness (which I like). So, they’re pretty much on the shelf until I put them in my lunch bag, and open them up at noon. I can warm them up during the day by keeping them on my dashboard in the sun. Either way, they’re still good, and less messy than defrosted stuff.

If you want me to name the brands, I can. 'Tis good stuff.

Oooh man, I will! I’ll have to figure out how to store them. Do they typically need to be refrigerated?

We’ve seen “mattar”, “muttar”, & “mutter”, figuring they were all the same.

Dervorin, that was a fantastic post. Thank you! I’m scribbling your notes onto a cheat sheet to take with me the next time I go to the store. I do have to agree with you though, that I too have a tendency to mix things “on a whim,” like when I’m making my annual batch of Christmas holubki. So yeah, I hear you.

My wife also got me a rice cooker recently, which I’m thinking of experimenting with the different spices I’ve got. Can y’all offer me a few simple things with plain ol’ basmati rice to try, or ought I just jump in and mix one cup of rice with a half tablespoon cumin/curry/etc.?

Yeah, me too.

Tripler
Mmmmmm, dal makhani.

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Yes, please let me know the brands. I’ve seen some of these prepacked meals, and was generally disappointed, compared to homemade meals (they’re also relatively expensive). The rice cooker is good. You should be able to make a nice pullau or biryani using it, aside from just plain rice.

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If you’re really interested in exploring Indian cuisine seriously, the first thing you have to learn is that there actually isn’t any such thing as “Indian cuisine.” Each region and ethnic group has its own (often multiple) cuisines. There are, for example, at least three types of Bengali cuisines–eastern (Bangal), western (Ghoti), and Muslim.

What you get in a generic Indian restaurant is usually a “greatest hits” type compilation with a heavy dose of Mughlai and Panjabi cuisine with bits of north central, north western, and southern cuisine thrown in. But when you look at individual cuisines, you’ll find huge differences.

Bengali, Goan, and Coastal (Bombay and southwards) cuisine are heavily involved in seafood, for example. Goan cuisine incorporates a lot of elements of Portuguese and other European influences. Then you have the Anglo-Indian cuisine, which is where things like fish kedgeree and chicken tikka masala come from. There’s even a category of “restaurant-only” food, like butter chicken (murgh makhani).

We often tend to think of south Indian cuisine as being exclusively vegetarian, but Kerala has a delicious non-veg cuisine (I’m not sure whether it counts as part of Coastal cuisine).

Even a single dish, a simple dal or puffed rice snack (muri), for example, tastes very different in Calcutta, Delhi, and Madras.

Indian Muslim cuisine even has several kinds of beef curry. Are those two words you’ve ever heard put together?

The variety is really awesome. Personally, I’ve only scratched the surface. I saw an absolutely amazing episode of Anthony Bourdain’s No Reservations in which he went to a Muslim neighborhood of Bombay and ate an amazing variety of grilled organ meats at a street full of food vendors.

Unfortunately, it all has to experienced live in person on location. The food there is amazing. The shrimps/prawns and chickens in India make the ones we get here taste like watered sawdust.

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I’m wracking my brain right now trying to think of the name of the company that makes the stuff I like…it’s one of the largest Indian food suppliers at least in North America. There’s a plastic tin of chicken Tikka Masala they sell that’s actually really good, if not big enough. I get them at Target, who’s got a much expanded Indian food section lately.

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Don’t overlook youtube!

I saw a video on how to make a basic curry there that has become a staple in our house. As we have made it many times now, it no longer seems hard or complicated. It is now routine and always delicious.

Sometimes we add chicken, sometimes fish, sometimes just veggies, sometimes the chicken or fish with the veggies. Now that we have that one basic recipe down, we are ready to add another…then another…

Plus, I made naan a couple of times. It was totally worth it and made me ‘famous’ with the Indian ladies at work!

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I give my chicken curry recipe in this thread – Bland Curry--what am I doing wrong? - Cafe Society - Straight Dope Message Board

Read the whole thing though, I kept forgetting things.

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Aha! Behold the power of the Internet to revive a failing memory. It’s Patak’sbrand that I like. It’s a bit expensive, but sometimes I don’t feel like cooking or I bring them for lunch at work and they’re surprisingly close to the taste of the stuff in the simmer sauce that they sell.

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Trader Joe’s has those tin-baggie Indian meals (veg only, I think) for @ $2. A bag of their frozen naan breads can live in the truck for a couple of days, dashboard cooking, hey, this could be a plan!

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That’s very true, but it’s also fairly advanced. It’s easy to be intimidated by the food of India, which is a huge country with a mind-boggling number of people (and languages) and a long, complicated history, all of which results in a multiplicity of cuisine that would take a lifetime to explore. You can’t start there, or your brain will lock up and stall.

Better to start with the “greatest hits” simplified version of the cuisine, as you call it. Even middling Indian food at your typical Americanized restaurant is pretty good.

Re the recipes, the cuisine can sometimes call for some specialized and hard-to-find ingredients, so I would strongly recommend starting with a slightly-watered-down resource, i.e. a cookbook with “easy” or “made simple” in the title (something like this, which was my first Indian cookbook), because its recipes will be adapted to some extent for the Western supermarket, with substitutions in ingredients, measurements, techniques, and so on. If you pick up an “authentic” cookbook to start with, you’ll be baffled in very short order, and probably frustrated.

Start with Indian 101 before going to the graduate-level courses.

And welcome to the very best cuisine on Earth. :slight_smile:

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Lately, I go with MTR which I like because the foil packets can be opened lengthwise, which is easier for spooning, or Swad which tends to have a slightly larger selection, but tends to be plastic pouches for microwavability. We also got Priya brand yesterday which I’ll try this week.

What’s pullau or biryani though? :dubious: (dubious, but in a good way).

acsenray, I’ve learned through pleasant means that there never is one way to make any sort of cuisine. I’ve had a lot of “Arab” cuisine, but I’ve noted the Qatari/Kuwaiti method of falafel or swarma is a little different than the Lebanese method. Even here in the states, Southern BBQ is far different than Western BBQ. But, you know, you have to sample all of the different types, which for me and my endless appetite for good food, does not seem to be a problem.

Cervaise, thanks for that link, and the suggestion! I think I may start trying things at home too–my wife is happy she got me on a more vegeterian-leaning diet (which helped me lose around 30 lbs. this year), compared to my ol’ regime of steak an’ taters. Of course, one can only grill so much chicken before one is bored with it. Thus, these slightly spicy things, I would love to try to make for her.

Ooh, naan! Ca3799, my wife picked up some onion naan for me, and I’ve tried it with hummus, some plain rice, spinach, and lemon juice folded together. I know it’s bare-bones (basically what I had at hand in the fridge), but man is it good. My usual fare of tortillas is good, but I think I’m getting bored of that though. Mmmmmm, naan.

Tripler
Mmmmm. Naan and hummus. Mmmmmm.

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Pullau is basically flavored rice. Biryani is basically a casserole. Rice with stuff in it.

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I’ve seen some good Indian cooking vids on youtube. I’m not gonna go look for the names now, if you’re so inclined they’re easy enough to find.