Despite its exoticism, Indian dishes do not seem so strange. Knowing and observing all the subtleties and tricks, any housewife can cook them. It should be noted that the recipes of this country can be very different from each other depending on the regions. In India several religions are widespread at once: Buddhism, Hinduism and Islam. It depends on religion what foods to eat and how to cook them. In our article, we suggest that you familiarize yourself with the most popular recipes of Indian cuisine, with a photo and a detailed description of the preparation.
The many faces of the kitchen
In our understanding, dishes prepared in the southern and central regions of India are traditional cuisine. Mostly vegetarian dishes are prepared in this part of the country. One of the favorite foods is rice, which is prepared in many ways. Various vegetable stews, stewed and boiled beans, Indian cakes, fruits, and also dairy products are very popular. In India, they do not eat beef, considering cows to be sacred animals. Nevertheless, there are meat dishes in Indian cuisine. For example, in Punjab and Kashmir, they prepare meat dishes, but use lamb or poultry for this purpose. In coastal areas, recipes for local cuisine are even more varied due to the fact that they have been exposed for a long time to overseas cuisines.
Submission Rules
Indian cuisine is served on thali. What is he like? This is a metal tray with small indentations in it, or it is, but with small bowls placed on it. Sometimes, instead of thali, banana leaves are used. A large handful of boiled rice, roti (another variety of bread cakes) or chapati is always placed on the center of the tray. Nearby are placed bowls with various Indian dishes: dhal, vegetable soup, vegetable curry, saji, yogurt. If you do not have special dishes, you can use ordinary dishes of large size. In the middle you need to put boiled rice, put the rest of the cooked dishes around, and use small tea cups or saucers for vegetable stew.
Rasam
We offer you to cook according to the following recipe a dish of Indian cuisine - rasam soup. It is cooked in southern India and eaten with rice. This is a light, fragrant and very tasty soup. It is believed that it has the following therapeutic effect: it helps with coughing, colds or chills. To prepare it, we need the following components:
- Tomatoes
- tamarind paste (lime juice can be);
- seasoning with races (cumin, coriander, pea flour, black pepper are mixed for it);
- the tour gave (otherwise - pigeon peas, replace with beans or lentils);
- coriander;
- salt;
- curry leaves;
- turmeric;
- coriander leaves;
- chilli;
- mustard seeds.
How to cook
First, prepare the pigeon peas, we need half a glass of it, fill in peas 1.5 cups of water and boil until cooked. Pour 750 ml of water into a deep pan, add two tbsp. l tamarind paste, salt, turmeric and two tsp. spice races very popular in indian cuisine. Two tomatoes cut into cubes and put in a pan. Bring to a boil and boil for about 10 minutes, after which we add a round gave and cook for another 5 minutes, avoiding boiling of water. Next, add chopped curry and coriander leaves and tsp to the pan. melted butter. Pour a little oil into a hot pan and fry red chili pepper and mustard seeds. As soon as the spices begin to crackle, remove from the heat and add them to the races soup. It is served hot, you can use the bowls for this.
Cooking Indian Food At Home
I want to say that all the same, real Indian food can be tasted only in India. Therefore, great connoisseurs of Indian dishes are advised to visit this amazing country and get to know national cuisine more closely. We offer a recipe for flat cakes that are baked throughout India.
Chapati
This, most likely, is not a dish, but the Indian national bread, which is a thin round cake. When you first saw chapatis, you might think that this is lavash, but it is not. For baking such bread in Indian cuisine (you can see it in the photo), coarse flour with bran content is used. In order to cook it, you will need the following products:
- 3 tbsp. l topl. oils;
- 150 ml of water;
- 2.5 cups wholemeal flour;
- 0.5 tsp salt.
Cooking
Combine the flour with salt, add water and knead a soft, slightly moist, homogeneous dough. Knead for about 6-10 minutes, sprinkle it with water and cover with a damp cloth. Leave the dough to rest for 30-45 minutes. Chapati is baked in a dry cast iron skillet. Cakes are fried until bubbles appear on the surface, and the edges begin to turn up. After this, the cake is turned on the other side and dried well. As soon as the product is removed from the pan, it is recommended to slam it with your hands on both sides so that air escapes, after which one side should be greased with oil.
Minced meat curry
Do you want to please your family with an unusually tasty and unusual dish? Prepare at home a recipe for Indian cuisine such a dish - curry with minced meat. You will need:
- 500 g of lamb pulp;
- 1 large onion;
- 2 cloves of garlic;
- 35 ml p. oils;
- Art. l curry (powder);
- 60 g of tomato paste;
- salt;
- ½ cup yogurt;
- green lettuce leaves.
Cooking technology
We chop the garlic and onions and fry in oil, add curry powder to them , warm them for another couple of minutes and add the tomato paste. We warm the mass for a few more minutes, then add finely chopped meat, yogurt, add salt and simmer until ready. When serving curry with lamb, we decorate lettuce leaves. As a side dish we serve friable boiled rice.
Tandoori Chicken
We offer another very interesting recipe for Indian cuisine - tandoori chicken. This dish name is associated with the Indian tandoori oven, in which chicken meat is baked. Since it is difficult to find such an oven in our country, meat can be cooked in the oven. We will need:
- two legs per serving;
- 250 g sour cream;
- 1 medium onion;
- lemon.
Spice:
- 2 cm ginger root;
- chilli;
- salt;
- 3 cloves of garlic;
- ground coriander;
- cumin (ground zira);
- turmeric.
Cooking recommendations
First of all, it is necessary to remove the skin from the legs, then make three deep incisions on the legs, thighs, on each joint, and, very importantly, it is necessary to incise all the tendons. Prepare a mixture of salt, lemon juice, chili and grate legs thoroughly, with special care in the cuts. Next, you need to prepare the marinade: for it, mix sour cream, add grated ginger and garlic, add salt, lemon juice and the spices listed in the recipe. If the color is not red enough, add paprika or food coloring. The legs are coated with a thick layer of the resulting marinade, and then cleaned in the refrigerator for one hour.
Heat the oven to the maximum temperature, place the wire rack, a baking sheet under it so that the juice flows into it during baking. If you do not have a wire rack, then pieces of chicken can be put on coarsely chopped hard vegetables, laid out on a baking sheet. We bake almost until completely cooked, then put onion chopped with thin rings on the chicken legs, pour over lemon juice and bring to readiness. This dish is served with fresh vegetables and sauce. The result should be a dish of bright red, saturated color, in the original this result is achieved using red Kashmir pepper. Like most Indian dishes, tandoori chicken is very spicy, with a spicy taste. Therefore, if you want the meat to be less sharp, and the color remains the same, you can reduce the amount of hot pepper by replacing it with paprika or food coloring, if you use dyes for cooking.
Indian vegetable stew
We advise you to cook a vegetable stew, which is called sabji in Indian cuisine, at home. It is a classic of Indian Vedic cuisine. In its appearance, the dish resembles ordinary stew and differs only in the presence in it of a huge number of different spices. To work, we need:
- 50 g oils;
- 5 large potatoes;
- ¼ part of a head of cabbage;
- one carrot;
- 100 g of sour cream;
- 3 tbsp. l green peas;
- 100 g of cheese panir (you can use Adyghe);
- 120 g of water;
- 1/6 tsp asafoetida (Indian seasoning similar in taste to garlic);
- ½ tsp turmeric
- black pepper;
- by ¼ tsp ground ginger and coriander;
- Bay leaf.
If desired, cauliflower, pumpkin, Brussels sprouts or asparagus can be added to the listed products.
At the bottom of a deep pan, spread carrots cut in medium cubes, lay cabbage on it, and then potatoes. If you use a pumpkin during cooking, put it on the top. Pour in water, put the bay leaf and simmer over low heat for 20 minutes, while the dish is not mixed. Remove from heat, add green peas, butter, cheese, sour cream and spices, leave for 5 minutes.
Pilaf Biriani
Each state in the country has its own proprietary recipe for pilaf biriani. There are many cooking options for this dish: seafood, chicken, vegetables are added to it. We bring to your attention a recipe for biryani with lamb. We will need:
- 1.5 kg of mutton (whole scapula and brisket);
- 2 carrots;
- two onions;
- 70 grams oils;
- one pomegranate (as a decoration);
- 1 teaspoon p. oils;
- 3 cloves of garlic;
- 0.5 kg of rice (preferably basmati or at least long-grain).
Spice:
- 10 pieces. green cardamom and 1 pc. black;
- ground coriander;
- 8 pcs black peppercorns;
- 10 pieces. cloves;
- turmeric;
- 3 tbsp. l barberry;
- 1 bay leaf;
- ½ tsp cinnamon.
Cooking secrets
We chop the meat into small pieces, cut the vegetables into strips, and soak the rice and barberry in water. Grind cardamom and pepper and combine with other spices. We take a wide frying pan, pour oil into it and heat it very much. Salt the meat and fry it very quickly over high heat until golden brown in order to preserve the largest amount of juice in it. Then add two tsp to it. spices and fry for another minute. Then pour in the water and simmer until tender. Fry carrots and onions until golden brown, add turmeric, pre-steamed rice and barberry. Gently mix and spread the meat, mix again. Season with another tsp. spices, put unpeeled garlic and simmer for another 15 minutes. We put the finished pilaf on a large dish, put the steamed head of garlic in the center and decorate with pomegranate seeds.
Indian Food Recipes
At home, it is easy to prepare delicious, fragrant Indian sweets. Let's cook them from chickpeas and dried fruits. For cooking, only natural ingredients are taken: figs, honey, chickpeas, dried apricots. Please note that in the recipe figs and dried apricots are soaked in cognac. Therefore, if sweets are prepared for children, it is better to use some kind of juice for this purpose. It is probably surprising that the recipe contains such an ingredient as chickpeas (beans of Turkish origin with a nutty flavor). This is understandable: in India, most of the population is vegetarian, so even all sweets are nutritious and nutritious. Nutrit in its nutritional value is equivalent to meat. For cooking, we need:
- 1 tbsp. l cognac;
- 30 g of honey;
- 40 g sesame;
- 200 grams of chickpea;
- 8 pcs. dried apricots and dried figs;
- 3 tbsp. l cocoa;
- cinnamon, powdered sugar to taste.
Cooking
Soak chickpeas for the whole night in water, and dried apricots and figs in cognac (orange juice). The next morning, chickpeas, as well as figs with dried apricots, are passed through a meat grinder or chopped using a blender. In the resulting mass, add honey and lemon zest, mix and roll the balls the size of a walnut. Roll the balls of your choice in crushed chocolate, walnut crumbs, or in a mixture of cocoa, cinnamon and nutmeg.