I want my naan, and I want it to be proper not this heavy stuff I’m getting from my Joy of Cooking recipe. (Mind you, it’s still good. Just not quite right)
I’ve seen a number of recipes for naan online but, without knowing anything about the person suggesting the recipe - well… I’d rather stick with something I know works for tasty, if not quite for the right effect. (Nothing sucks worse than working for hours on some new dish, doing the recipe as best one can, and then finding out, after it’s all done, that it sucks. Especially since I can afford to throw food out.)
Of course, a bonus with such a cookbook is that I’d also get saag paneer (sp), too. I want me some of that, too.
(As an aside, does anyone else wonder whether Shelley Winters was a farm brat? Lampchop? :eek: )
Madhur Jaffrey writes pretty good Indian cookbooks. You can find any number on Amazon. My mom is my cookbook so I don’t use any but I was on epicurious one day laughing at the Indian recipes (not the recipes themselves but how low they’re rated…like bhel puri, which is the nectar of gods) and I came across a Madhur Jaffrey recipe for this beet coshimbir (raita) that I adore and know is a reasonably obscure Indian food (i.e. you won’t find it at your local Taj restaurant or whatever).
Jaffrey is pretty good, but Julie Sahni’s Classic Indian Cooking is my choice. This is the one that got me started making Indian food, and the New York Times picked it as one of six all-time cooking “bibles.”
Most of the recipes in Madhur Jaffery’s Quick and Easy Indian Cooking are designed for a pressure cooker, and if you have one, it’s absolutely amazing. Super fast, super delicious—and the use of the pressure cooker is completely authetic, according to my friends from the Subcontinent.
It doesn’t have a recipe for paneer, but her book of Asian vegetarian cooking does, and lots of other amazing yummy stuff besides.
May I reccommend Sanjeev Kapoor? He is one of the famous chefs in India and also has the most popular cookery show on TV.
I am a student away from home and use his books sometimes. The website has some free recipes but a subscription is worth it and you can get loads of recipes that way.
Amazon
has books by Sanjeev Kapoor. I think some his recipes use harcore Indian cooking terminologies but you can always turn to the dope for that.
Also, you can find Paneer in any self respecting Indian store. You can also make it at home it pretty easy.
Is he the one on the Indian channel (that’s broadcast in the US…zed-tv or whatevs)? Because my parents used to watch that religiously and made one of his recipes, a fusion Indian Thanksgiving casserole (last year). It was pretty amazing.
I checked out a book from the library called Indian Home Cooking by Suvir Saran and Stephanie Lyness. It doesn’t have a recipe for naan, but it has Saag Paneer and some other good recipes. You can visit the author’s website at www.suvir.com.
Yes **anu-la[\b], he happens to be the same guy. He has a program on Zee TV called Khana Khazana (translated - Treasure of Food). Most of his stuff is really very good.
I can’t promise this is an authentic interpretation, but curds are what you get when you begin turning buttermilk into cheese. One way to get those at home is to simmer some buttermilk. The clumps of stuff you get that way are one form of curds. I don’t know whether that would suffice for use in the recipe, but I’d be willing to give it a try.
Of course, some of the better supermarkets will sell curds directly to customers, too. Either in the premium cheese section, or in the dairy section. (I love me my Wegmans.)
Funny thing is, I don’t think I’ve seen anything but lowfat buttermilk on the market these days. All it is is buttermilk made with lowfat milk & live cultures, instead of whole milk & live cultures.
And I third (or fourth or whatever) the Jaffrey series of cookbooks. They’re perhaps the definitive texts on Indian cuisine in the English language.
It’s a good book, but not, I suspect, for beginners. Aside from the simpler side-dish recipes like naan, most the dishes mentioned are pretty complex, and the language targeted at experienced cooks. Considering how it’s so easy to blow a meal with, say, a badly cooked gravy or undercooked rice, a book needs one of those simple but effective recipes that ease the learning curve and adds to one’s feeling of accomplishment; and I know, I’ve been trying to follow its basic basmati rice-cooking procedure for ages now, and it never works. The size and complexity of the recipes – plus, the near-absence of chicken dishes – means it’s not the book I reach for when I just want to make dinner for myself.
For beginners all over, I heartily recommend the Basic series of books (which includes Basic Asian, which I haven’t read), which includes some excellent, easy Indian recipes. These are colourful, well-written, pragmatic, and wonderfully no-nonsense books particularly suited to the bachelors among us.
I’ve noticed that the “gh” sound is really hard for Americans…it’s in my real name and most people mispronounce it. Basically it’s a strong guh-huh (together) that comes sort of out of the back of your throat. So the pronounciation is “GH-eee.” It’s also called “toop” in other parts of the country so that might be easier
“Authentic” Indian cooking is hard to pin down…regional cuisine can vary widely. Also Indians tend to be a bit more health-conscious these days…my parents have replaced everything that calls for toop with dabs of olive oil (including on chapatis) and has gone to extensive lengths to find subs for coconut (substituting everything from apples to whatnot).
Yeah, drained cottage cheese would be one form of curds. Curds can come in bigger sizes, too. You folk from Wisconsin know what I’m talking about. Curds are the beginning of the cheese-making process. After rennet is added to warm milk, the milk is allowed to sit and the curds seperate from the whey in a fairly homogenous semisold mass atop the milk. The curds are then cut, drained, pressed, and aged to make hard cheese.
I assume the curds in the recipe come from this step in the process, but I’m not sure specifically what kind of curds Indian cooking would use. Wisconsin cheese curds have a different texture from cottage cheese curds, which have a different texture from fresh curds scooped off the top of milk.
The closest substitute to curds is unflavored yoghurt. That what I use now and it works pretty well.
Well, ghee is not that widely used in Indian cooking anymore, pretty much as anu-la noted, more and more people use different oils (varies by region- coconut oil in some,groundnut and mustard oils in others).
