Restaurant Review: Soam, Babulnath

Soam had been on our radar for some years now but whenever Mom would suggest going there, I would quickly circumvent the suggestion by jumping in with a demand to go to our family's all time favourite restaurant Samrat instead. I had visions of having to eat a set meal (thaali) burgeoning with  ghee-soaked, garlic-and-onion-less, spice-free 'satvik' dishes, which made me shudder. Especially when contrasted with rich, perfectly spiced Dum Aloo and tangy Aloo Chat which is our fixed order at Samrat.

A glowing recommendation by my cousin A reduced my resistance somewhat. A is not the sort to wax eloquent about insipid food, so I readily agreed when les parents suggested Soam for Sunday lunch.

We reached just on time at 12:45 and snagged the last vacant table. The restaurant is small-ish but pleasant, with creamy mango-yellow walls, simple wooden tables & stools, and tablemats fashioned out of dry pressed leaves.

The leaf tablemats and beaten-metal plates at Soam

The menu was a revelation - instead of a set thaali meal, the menu had separate sections for staters, one-dish meals, mains and desserts. There was a separate menu for low-cal options as well. And the what was remarkable was the kind of dishes available on the menu - snacks and mains from Gujarati, UP, Bengali, South Indian and Maharashtrian kitchens which aren't usually seen on fancy restaurant menus, all offered here with a culinary twist. For instance - smaosas stuffed with spinach and cheese. Kothimbir wadi livened up with the addition of corn. A red rice dosa (made with organic red rice flour) chock-full of cucumber shreds, served with the traditional coconut chutney. The Bengali potatoes-cooked-in-curd-with-minimal-spices served up with puris stuffed with a gren pea filling. And the most amazing khichadi, with the masterstroke touch of a garlic-and-butter tadka. The khichadi was oh so good, we ordered some to be taken away for dinner!

Green pea-stuffed puris, served with potatoes cooked in a mildly spice yoghurt-based curry

Red rice dosa with cucumber

Paapdi Chaat

Seasonal special - baked mango yoghurt. Mom and Dad liked it, I found it so-so

All of the food is tasty without being laden with spice or oil. That's why despite pigging out to glory (6 dishes between 3 people), we didn't feel heavy or bloated or listless the way one usually does after a rich Sunday lunch.

The menu has lots of interesting dishes yet to be tried (paanki, chilla, bajra pockets etc) so a couple more trips are anticipated. :) But the khichadi will always feature in our selection.......

Vaghareli Khichadi - shortest and easiest route to heaven!

Kitchen Experiments: Hazelnut Flourless Cake

Continuing with the edible record (paradox?) of my travels in Turkey, I baked a flourless hazelnut cake using the roasted hazelnuts I had purchased in Istanbul.

Approximately 75% of the world's hazelnut production comes from Turkey, and given my weakness for Nutella and Ferrero Rocher, it was inevitable I would hunt down hazelnuts in Istanbul. Surprisingly, I didnt find too many shops in the Spice Bazaar selling loose hazelnuts. Though the tiny grocery next to our hotel had small nibbles-with-drinks-sized packs aplenty! I finally picked up the much-desired hazelnuts at a deli .........................at Istanbul Airport! (yes,and not in the straight-from-the-Arabian-Nights Spice Bazaar or on the cobblestone streets of the Old City as I had fondly hoped to do)


Hazelnuts, apart from being delicious to taste, also have a rich aroma and flavour of their own (unlike most nuts which have taste but not SCENT) and do not need any flavouring to compliment them. So the hazelnut flourless cake I baked is incredibly simple - just hazelnuts, egg whites and sugar. No vanilla or cardamom or nutneg or cinnamon required. Try doing that with almonds or cashewnuts and you'll understand what I mean!



Hazelnut Flourless Cake

Ingredients:

1 cup hazelnuts, roasted and peeled
1 cup sugar, ground fine (else use icing sugar) - you can vary the amount of sugar as per taste
3 egg whites

Method:

Preheat the oven. Mine is an old fashioned one with no timer or temperature control, so cant give you exact measures. But preheat it like you would for other cakes.

Line a cake tin with baking parchment. Or simply grease and flour the tin.

Grind the hazelnuts in a coffee grinder. Be sure that you give just 2-3 short spurts of grinding and not a continuous whirr - else the oil from the hazelnuts will start separating and give you hazelnut paste, and not dry rubbly hazelnut meal.



Whisk the egg whites till they are thick and shiny and just near the soft-peaks stage. (I did this by hand - takes about 10-15 minutes of whisking - but you are welcome to use a hand blender)

Add the sugar gradually, whisk strongly in between batches.

Add the ground hazelnut and fold gently.

Pour the mix (it should be thick and voluptuous, not runny) into the cake tin, and push it into the oven.


Bake till the mixture turns colour and becomes a dark golden.

Insert a skewer to check if the cake batter is cooked - if the skewer comes out clean, switch off the oven and immediately take out the cake and cool it as soon as you can under a fan.

Cut into pieces/slices, dust with powdered sugar (you may mix some powdered cinnamon with the sugar before dusting for added oomph) and serve with tea/coffee.


AND NOW THE DENOUMENT:

This post is a grand forgery. I started out making hazelnut macaroons, not cake. (See this recipe) But a series of events led to their transmogrification into cake:

• My parents were too hungry for their lunch (the oven was taking up space on the dining table and I was taking up space in our small kitchen), so my Dad chivvied me into making one giant macaroon instead of piping the batter into individual macaroon rosettes and baking them in batches

• Either my oven is not powerful enough, or I was too impatient, or my parents were too hungry and cranky or the one-giant-macaroon approach didn't work - and I pulled out the "cake" when it was cooked through but soft, rather than crisp and crunchy.

Anyhow, the "cake" was delicious, and in a blind test (as in presented proudly as "flourless cake" instead of "failed macaroons" to unsuspecting friends at work) it emerged as delicious, rich, nutty and was polished off in record time.


So all's well that ends well, eh? :)