Indian Tandoori Cooking

Traditionally, tandoori dishes are cooked in a tandoor, an oval shaped clay oven with a small fire in the bottom. The heat rises gradually but ultimately reaches a much higher temperature than a barbeque.

A tandoor is normally used to cook naan bread, meats and kebabs (meat or paneer). The bread is stuck to the sides, the kebabs stood vertically and whole chickens rested on a grid over the fire.

For domestic cooking, a tandoor is not really convenient but the meat dishes can be reproduced on a barbeque or in the oven. The bright red appearance of tandoori meats which you may see in Indian restaurants is produced by a food dye which really isn’t necessary to enhance the look of your tandoori dishes.

I have a great fondness for tandoori style food. It has flavour, without being "hot" or high in calories or too filling. In fact it's an ideal dish summer or winter, if you fancy something a little different. As a bonus, it doesn't take hours to prepare. Of course you can take all the effort out of it and use a pre-prepared mix, but I think they have less flavour and you can’t use them for anything else, whereas if you use the individual spices, you can make other dishes as well.

You can easily make tandoori chicken (whole), tandoori lamb chops (pork would be more unusual, but there’s no reason why you shouldn’t use it, if you prefer) and lamb tikka (kebabs) but my personal favourite is chicken tikka because it’s so quick so here’s my own recipe.

This recipe serves two people - multiply it for as many people as you want.

Ingredients

• 2 Chicken breasts
• 1 small tub Greek yogurt
• 1 tsp ground cumin
• 1 tsp ground coriander
• ½ tsp ground turmeric
• ½ tsp ginger powder
• ½ tsp chilli powder (or to taste)
• 1 small clove garlic, crushed
• salt to taste
• 1 tbsp lemon juice

Cut the chicken breasts into 1 inch cubes and set aside.
Mix the spice powders and garlic into the yogurt. You can use low fat yogurt if you prefer. You can also use fresh ginger or ginger paste from a jar rather than ginger powder but go easy on the quantity as it can be quite over-powering.

At this point you can also mix in the salt and lemon juice but if you do so, don’t leave the chicken to marinade for more than about 20 minutes or it will become very dry when cooked. If you want to marinade it for a longer time, add the salt and lemon juice just before you cook the dish or sprinkle on to serve.

Thread the chicken onto skewers and either barbeque or cook under a grill using medium heat until the chicken is slightly browned and cooked through.

For a light meal, serve with salad, pitta or naan bread and lemon wedges or for something more substantial with rice and dahl.

The Cooking of Kerala

Kerala is situated on the South West coast of India right beside Tamil Nadu. The capital is Cochin with its bustling harbour lined with fishing nets and home to fishing boats of all shapes and sizes. Much of the architecture has been influenced by the Chinese who traded along the coast leaving legacy of cooking pots similar to woks, cleavers and pickling jars. As well as the Chinese, the abundance of spices in Kerala attracted the attentions of the early Phoenicians, Syrians, Egyptians, Greeks and Romans all of whom were happy just to trade and return home. Fighting over the territory didn’t begin until the late 15th Century when the British, Dutch, Portuguese and French tried to stake their claims to the spice riches. The British ended up the victors and set up a factory and depot dealing in spices in Tellicherry, a name still associated with good quality pepper. Black pepper is prolific in Kerala and makes a major contribution to India’s input of one third of the world’s production. Cardamom too is a native here and the warm, damp growing conditions are ideal for ginger and turmeric rhizomes to flourish. Kerala is famous for its inland waterways including lakes, lagoons, canals and rivers, collectively known as backwaters, bordered by tropical, lush, greenery and paddy fields as well as homes and schools. The backwaters provide a road network along which transport in the form of canoes, grass-thatched rice boats and overloaded water buses ply their trade. Kerala means “land of the coconuts” and no part of the coconut is wasted - the oil is used for frying and the dressing of hair. The flesh appears in a large number of cooked dishes and the coir which is produced from the husk of the coconut, is used to make floor mats, mattresses and many handicrafts. Fish is big business here - a lot of prawns are exported to Japan and USA, having first been peeled and sorted by size by an all-woman workforce and frozen. Squid too goes to Japan as well as frogs’ legs to France but the majority is eaten locally. There are many methods of fishing - Chinese fishing nets attached to upright wooden poles catch what is swimming by. The nets are raised and lowered with ropes and the catch extracted. Trawlers fish the deeper waters and, as elsewhere, fill their nets with anything and everything which can’t escape through the mesh. On some beaches you can buy fresh caught pomfret, tiger prawns, red snapper, crabs and mullet, to name but a few and have it stir-fried at a shack where a quick sauce of garlic and shallots is tossed with turmeric and chilli. The fishermen eat what they call Boatman’s Curry. It uses meaty fish steaks such as cod, swordfish or salmon, cooked in a thick spice paste (red chillies, cayenne pepper, paprika, ground coriander, turmeric and grated coconut) which is first fried then mixed with tamarind paste, green chillies, ginger, shallots and salt. Apart from fish, a popular celebration meal is “stew” for especially for Christians at the end of fasting for Lent. Made from boneless lamb shoulder with potatoes and carrots simmered in spicy sauce of cardamom, cinnamom, cloves, curry leaves, ginger green chillies and onion with coconut milk added at the end, it resembles a spicy Irish stew. Another favourite lamb dish is shoulder meat stewed with fennel, spices, vinegar and toasted coconut chips. The sauce is allowed to dry out so it clings to the meat and the dish is finished with fried mustard seeds, shallots and curry leaves. Duck and chicken are readily available and vegetable dishes are common as many Hindus are vegetarian. Whatever the vegetable, it will very often be mixed with coconut. Local boiled red rice is eaten with every meal and sometimes appams which are rice pancakes with a spongy centre. Ginger chutney or yoghurt with pineapple may also be served. Favourite snacks are paper-thin slices of plantain or banana deep fried in coconut oil - the Keralan equivalent of western potato chips.

Indian Cookery with a British Twist

In a traditional Indian home, the wife and mother does not go out to work. She stays at home and spends her days making sure that there is wholesome and tasty food ready for her family to eat whenever they may want it. If there are other older women in the household such as aunts or a grandmother, they will help too.

An Indian girl will start learning to cook at a very early age and will be expected to help her mother with the household catering and cleaning too. At her mother's side a daughter will learn how to grind spices, how to mix them to make various masalas and exactly when and how to add them to individual dishes. She will learn how to make various types of bread - chapattis, rotis, parathas and more. She will learn to make several dishes at the same time, no Indian meal consisting of only one dish, and she will learn the art of producing the crispest deep-fried onion bhajis and pakora. The girl's skill in the kitchen can make the difference between her finding a husband or not.

There's no getting away from it, delightful though Indian cuisine is, producing a meal is a complex and time-consuming business, even for the most experienced Indian housewife.

That's the traditional way. However, in modern-day India and in Britain, where many Indian families have made their homes, life is quite different.

These days, Indian women often do not have the luxury of staying at home all day. They want or need to go out to work. Indian girls brought up in Britain see other girls of their age going shopping, to parties, to visit friends, to school, to college and ultimately to work and they don't want to stay at home with their mothers, slaving over a hot stove. On top of that, they don't want to lose the culture and flavours of Indian cuisine.

What to do then, when Indian cookery does not provide a quick answer to providing a meal? Vicky Bhogal has found the answer. In her book, Cooking Like Mummyji, she explores the culinary problems of a modern Indian girl living in Britain and provides an interesting answer.

I suppose we would call this fusion cooking as it is a mixture of the flavours of India and the simplicity of British family food and the results are great tastes produced in the minimum of time. I particularly recommend Fishcakes with Bite and for Sunday lunch with a difference, Green Masala Roast Chicken - absolutely delicious.

For all your Indian cooking needs why not visit my Asian Food Online Store

Curry - A Journey

Due to a childhood in the Middle East, I was practically brought up on curry. My first memories of it are eating curried goat in the fire station of Dubai airport in about 1962. My dad was the airport manager and the Chief Fire Officer and his family were our good friends and neighbours. The firemen cooked for our two families - fiery hot curry for the adults and a much milder version for us kids. Some of the men were of Arabic origins and some of Indian so I think the resulting meal was something of a mixture.

I remember we were offered chairs and cutlery but we preferred to sit on the floor and in the traditional manner, ate only with our right hands. This posed something of a problem for my mother as she was left-handed - she avoided making inexcusable gaffes by sitting on her left hand until the meal was over.

We learnt to roll rice into balls and with the aid of chapattis (wheat flour flatbreads), scooped up the curry and popped it into our mouths without making too much mess. I don’t think I ate curry again in that way until many years later when I visited Goa and, at a spice plantation, was once again faced with banana leaf plates and fingers only. Bizarrely, in a nearby clearing, was a pink porcelain, pedestal hand basin with a hose pipe attached to the tap, fully supplied with soap and hand towels.

During those days of being expatriates in foreign lands, the British developed a liking for curry lunch on a Sunday. Doubtless this originated in India in the days of the Raj but still found its way to the Middle East and Africa. A group of friends would gather either at one of their houses or the local club. There would be beers or gins and tonics first (cola or fizzy orange for the kids). There wouldn’t be a choice of curries, as I recall, it was always chicken and no matter where we ate it and it always tasted the same. The accompaniments didn’t vary much either but we didn’t mind. There would be poppadoms, mango chutney and a variety of sambals - chopped fruits and salad stuff which might include any or all of banana, pineapple, apple, tomato, cucumber, onion, desiccated coconut, peanuts and raisins or sultanas. With luck there would be chapattis too.

My next curry experiences were back in England. How different it all was. Indian restaurants furnished in red velvet with flocked wallpaper in gold. All sorts of different curries - not only the main ingredient but the mix of spices and flavourings. There were choices of plain or spicy poppadoms, different breads and vegetable curries and dahls as well, no sambals though! On the down side, these curries were often rather greasy and we always thought of them as being terribly fattening - naughty but oh so nice! The saviour, if conscience got the better of us was Tandoori-cooked meats. These were marinated in yoghurt and spice paste and cooked in a Tandoor (an earthenware charcoal oven), so were in effect grilled and much healthier.

Change again then when I finally visited India in 1988 and discovered that meat curries were the exception rather than the rule. Many Indians are vegetarians so paneer (similar to cottage cheese) is popular as are the many dishes made with pulses and vegetables. There was no trace of the greasiness found in restaurants in the UK and the flavours were quite different too.

This voyage of discovery culminated in a determination to learn how to reproduce Indian food in my own home but more of that in another article.