Kitchen Experiments : Risotto

Risotto had been a long-standing item in my 'To try' list - ever since I read about it in Vir Sanghvi's delicious book 'Rude Food'. And since I tasted the most divine mushroom risotto at Spaghetti Kitchen (Phoenix Mills, Mumbai) 2 years ago. (Its another thing that the second time I sampled SK's risotto a few month's back, it was nowhere near my first delightful experience!)

Like all classic dishes, this one seemed too simple to be true - but in its simplicity lay the danger of going wrong.In a complex dish with lots of ingredients, its relatively easy to cloak your mistakes - but in a dish which has one primary flavour/ingredient, a mistake is almost impossible to hide.

To add to this, the process of making a risotto seems riddled with pitfalls - there is no clear indication as to how long is the rice to be cooked (al dente is so relative!), at what stage does one safely assume that the stock has been absorbed by the rice - and most exapseratingly - how does one know that the rice looks 'wet and slightly dark because of its own starch' and not 'wet and slightly dark becuase of too much stock'?!!

After the Great Veggie Meatball Debacle, I was wary about trying anyhting new and exotic - but a pressing need to either use up or throw away some white wine (and ditto some fancy imported stock cubes)meant that I calmed my quaking heart and stepped into the kitchen to make risotto.I used some fat and short rice we'd got from the grocers (didnt want to splurge on Arborio/Carnaroli/other expensive imported rice, especially after the GVMD). Basically any rice which becomes sticky when cooked rather than each grain standing separate (like Basmati and other long-grained varieties) will do. Purists might turn their noses at anything less than Arborio, and yes, the quality of the risotto will vary according to the rice used (since the rice is the hero of this dish) but for a first-timer, any short-grained sticky rice type will do.

I also used bare essentials for the rest of the ingredients - I skipped the mushrooms and the chicken/seafood and used whatever white wine I had on hand, just so that I wouldnt feel bad in case the dish flopped.

And as luck would have it - it turned out well! Of course there's room (lots of it!) for improvement, but this was good enough to encourage me to try it again, this time with better ingredients. :)

I used the recipe (its actually more a process than a recipe) given in 'Rude Food' and since its a generic process, I dont have any qualms sharing it with you all here:

1. Make lots of stock - either from scratch (tough!) or use stock cubes/stock concentrate. This is the main flavouring for the risotto, so I would recomed using good quality cubes/concentrate, made entirely of natural ingredients. I used an imported Knorr chicken broth cube. A vegetable stock might be too feeble unless boosted by adding flavoursome mushrooms in the ristto.

2. If you're adding seafood/chicken/mushrooms to the risotto (I didnt) lightly saute them (till half-cooked) in olive oil and keep them aside.

3. Gently fry finely chopped onion and garlic in olive oil or olive oil-and-butter. Add some dried mixed herbs.

4. Add raw, unwashed (yes!) rice straight from the packet(a good fistful/ 3/4ths of a cup per person) and saute with the onion and garlic for about3-4 minutes.

5. Add a splash of white wine (no particular type), enough to just cover the rice in the pan. Wait till the rice has absorbed the wine.

6. Add the hot stock, one ladle at a time and keep stirring the rice till the ladleful of stock is absorbed.

7. Repeat step 6 till the rice is cooked but not mushy. (Wikipedia says about 17 minutes after adding the first ladleful - but that is for those expensive rice varieties) If using mushrooms/chicken/seafood, add it to the rice midway through the cooking process.

8. The final risotto should be sticky, not runny (not like the Maharashtrian mau-bhaat!) with a gooey consistency.

Take it off the flame, add some butter/grated Parmesan and mix through. Serve piping hot.

Random Sampling : Sagar Sweets, Mahim, Mumbai

No, I am not going to get statistical in my posts, 'random sampling' is essentially foodie indulgence which doesnt fall in any clear category (stores/restaurants/home) - the catch-all 'Miscellaneous'. :)

On Sunday, we made a quick stop at Sagar Sweets to buy some mithai for Ganeshotsav. And the way Dad, Mom and I betook ourselves was so indicative of our foodieness - or the lack of it.

Dad - walked straight into the store, bought what was required and stepped out.
Mom- stayed back in the car
Me - totally distracted by the trays (platters, salvers, plates...) of food being set out on folding tables on the pavement outside the store; bugged the poor guy laying it all out with my questions; clicked a few dozen pictures on my phone camera; finally bought a booty of goodies to taste!

The holy month of Ramzaan is on and that pocket of Mahim is predominantly Islamic. Muslims fast through the day during Ramzaan and can eat only during the night. Therefore, in the Muslim pockets of the city, during Ramzaan, come evening, and the streets are lined with stalls serving exotic food, traditional dishes you might not get through the year. Makeshift stalls come up, restaurants set up tables and stalls outside the premises as take-away counters, and crowds throng the streets. The month-long fasting ends with Eid when the celebrations continue through the night.
Sagar Sweets, being a combined bakery-and-sweetshop owned by a Muslim family, had on offer an interesting multitude of dishes being laid out in preparation for the evening. Some of them were instantly recognised, but thanks to my questioning the guy arranging all the stuff on the tables (poor chap was so bashful, I suppose he never had a curious female asking him to explain what all the dishes were!), every offering soon had a handle.


The yellow squares were blocks of bread pudding, freshly baked.



The green porridge-like dish in the silvery tray was doodhi halwa (doodhi/bottlegourd/calabash, is slowly simmered with thickened milk, nuts, sugar to form a comforting, rich mash)

The samosas looked plumciously inviting!



The puff pattices (patties?) looked the deal - layers and layers of flaky puff pastry swaddling a spicy-salty vegetable mash

And the piece de resistance - heaps of shallow earthen bowls containing phirni. (A porridge/pudding made of thickened milk and rice - flavoured with kevda/rose water)




I bought the puff pattice, the bread pudding and of course, the phirni. We did a taste test the next day and the results were:


Puff pattice - the ususal: too-oily, too spicy yet addictive. Nothing spectacular.

Bread pudding : We were a little disconcerted with the sunny yellow colour (though the blistered golden-brown top was reassuring) - we thought it would be too eggy. I do not like custard-based puddings that have an eggy aroma - and it's worse when the eggy scent is tried to be covered up with a stonger flavour like artificial vanilla or cardamom - because then you get 2 distinct smells - egg and the vanilla! But this bread pudding, despite its rich yellow colour had absolutely no whiff of egg. There were eggs in there - the silken smooth set texture couldnt be achieved without them - but no hint of the strong eggy flavour at all, and just a hint of vanilla. The barest hint. Oh, this pudding was divine- velvety smooth and not overly sweet. Score!

Phirni - Oh my goodness. This version of the popular dessert was even better than the one I'd sampled in Amritsar . Rice flour and milk slowly are simmered together with a few plump grains of rice to create a soft, smooth porridge which is then left to set in shallow earthenware bowls. The earthenware bowls leach excess moisture away giving a set, spoon-hugging consistency.

This phirni had achieved that wonderful textural balance between smooth and nubbly; and had a delicate almost-set consistency. And flavoured with a very light touch of kevda (kewra) jal (An extract distilled from pandanus flowers - gives a floral and sweet fragrance). Its easy to go overboard with kevda, giving a cloyingly sweet aroma but this was sublime!

As he was scraping away at the last of the phirni at the bottom of the clay bowl, Dad mumbled "Eid is on the 21st - gives us plenty of time"

:D

EDIT 27/08/09: Had visited Sagar again today. This time I reached there when business was brisk, at 7:30 PM. And laid out on the tables outside was a veritable feast for the eyes...... In addition to all the goodies I mentioned in the post there was:

1. A huge kadhaai (wok) in which golden pillows of malpuawere being fried

2. A tray full of sunset-orangejalebis , glistening with syrup

3. Another tray with massive helpings of shahi tukra (fried bread served with thickened milk-with-nuts)

4. A collection of little plastic bowls filled with mini rasmalais

5. Ditto of individually decorated creme caramels (caramel custard)

I stared at all this goodness in a haze of sugar-induced euphoria - AND walked away with just 4 little pots of phirni - to be given away!

Am I not the most virtuously good person you ever knew? ;)

Kitchen Experiments : Vegetable Khichadi a la Dad

Today was yet another 'fun dinner' (to quote a friend) at our house - Khichadi (made by Dad) and SevPuri (made by Mom). What was I doing? Well, I was acting as sous-chef to Dad - doing all the peeling-and-chopping, laying the table - all the non-starring roles. :-( ;-)

As I said in a previous post , Dad favours easy, one-dish meals - dishes which are flavousome and wholesome. Today's khichadi was yet another such dish - and kudos to Dad, he made up the recipe himself!

Rice. Lentils (moong daal - with the shells on). Carrots. French Beans. Onion. Garlic - just a touch. Spices (Goda Masala)- the barest whisper. And salt (to taste, of course. :-) )

A bit of saute action in a wok(onion, garlic, green chillies). Followed by the veggies. And the rice and lentils. Topped with recently-boiled water. Seasonings adjustment. (masala and salt). Covered and left to cook till the rice-and-lentils-and-veggies are just-cooked. Care taken to not let them become mush.

Served piping hot. Ghee - optional.

A full tummy and a smile on the face - mandatory. :-)P

Kitchen Experiments - err....make that Kitchen Disaster!

I had a holiday in the middle of the week and thought it would be an excellent time to try replicating one of my favourite sandwiches at Subway in my kitchen. The Chicken Meatball Marinara is one sandwich you can enjoy without any guilt - if you eat it the way I do. No cheese, no mayo-based sauces - and Subway doesnt butter the bread, anway. Simple and flavoursome. But paying INR 105 for such a simple dish makes me break out in goosebumps - so this sandwich was next on my 'To Try' list.
However, given my family's vegetarian leanings, the supply of soya granules in the store supboard and the plethora of 'veggie meatballs' recipes on the Net, I decided to make a vegetarian version of my favourite sandwich.
And it flopped - miserably!
The details are too painful (and too long!) to get into, and in all honesty, I wasnt going to post this spectacular debacle on the blog at all - but I learnt a few important lessons which I would like to share with other fledgling cooks:

1. Soya has an incredibly resistant flavour. NOTHING can cloak it. Only a few spices/aromatics complement it and make it taste yummy. (Far-eastern condiments do the trick - not surprising, given soya's origins!) Do not overestimate your ability to give lift to the flavour of a soya-based dish - the meaty-yet-not-meat aroma is all pervasive.

2. Think twice (nay, several times!) before you substitute one type of nut for another. Each nut has a different flavour and oil content. My recipe called for powdered pecans/walnuts and having powdered peanuts on hand (danyacha koot!) I used that instead. DISASTER! This was the step that was the beginning of the end, as far as my sandwich recipe went. Peanuts, too, have a strong flavour (sweetish) which cannot be masked easily. I wanted the nuts to give the 'meat'balls just some bite and body (not flavour) and they ended up doing just the opposite - they made the dough runny(because of the oil they released) and peanut-flavoured!

3. Dont try to salvage a dish which is beyond repair. It's best to throw a failed experiment in the bin - rather than slave over it for hours, expending time, energy and money trying to make it edible. The effort is like a Wagnerian opera - things just keep on getting worse and worse till the end comes (ie. you snap, throw away the dish and storm out of the kitchen in a haze of tears/anger/bitterness)

I was so disheartened by this disaster (I am normally a reasonably talented cook!) and the peanutty smell pervading my kitchen, that I thought I wouldnt be able to face another kitchen experiment ever again. But, now, after a passage of 3 days, I feel better. Perhaps I am not upto juggling with ingredients and playing around with established recipes yet - but that doesnt mean I can't come up with my own, from scratch! :D

The miracle of Katra Ahluwalia

A flurry of messages from friends telling me that they'd read my blog 'inside-out' made me want to do the same. :D
As I was browsing through my posts on Amritsar, I was shocked to see NOT ONE POST describing the miracle of Katra Ahluwalia.

Katra Ahluwalia....located at the end of one of the numerous winding lanes oppsite the Golden Temple in the heart of Amritsar.Tangled electricity transmission cables hang overhead, parked cycles and motorbikes block a foot or two of the 6 foot-wide-lane, constant traffic - pedestrian and bikes/cycle rickshaws-tries to overtake you in the 4 ft of road left empty, the old mouldy buildings close in on either side of the road....as you walk deeper and deeper into old Amritsar.

Finally (well, actually, its just a 5-min walk!) you reach a clearing of sorts. A junction, if you care to call it that, where 3-4 lanes meet. Located in this prime real estate (yeah, right) is the epicentre of Amritsar's culinary delights. 'Gurdaas Ram Jalebian Waala' sells the most intoxicatingly delicious gulab jamuns and jalebis. A trip to Amritsar is futile without having sampled the fare here!

The store (I cant even call it that, its just like an open verandah of an old building) is resolutely no-frills with old and decidedly grimy looking walls and furniture.



But chances are, you'll never even notice this - because the first thing you would notice (if you're reasonably sane) are the kadhaais full of jalebis being fried in bubbling ghee. And the gulab jamuns glistening a golden brown in pans of syrup.







The gulab jamun here is a thing of beauty and grace. The size of a golf ball, it has a glorious golden-brown hue and the radiance of having soaked in just the right amount of syrup. You get one gulab jamun for a paltry Rs 4, in a 'dron' (a small bowl made of dried leaves) The spoon slips through with the greatest ease, the texture is so soft. But it is not overly squishy - it maintains the exquisite balance between firm bite and soft, soft meltingness. Drooool....

The jalebi, on the other hand looks like the gulab jamun's poor cousin.



It is not very attractive to look at - with its uneven appearance (some spirals are thin while others are swollen and misshapen) and dull orange-brown colour. (I adore a golden, delciate filigreed jalebi!). But take one bite.......................... and you're lost. The first crunch (yes, it is a resounding crunch!) floods your mouth with piping hot syrup, redolent with the aroma of ghee. It is an explosion of flavour! Each ungainly spiral is a mouthful of pure pleasure. You get a dron-full - about 4-5 small jalebis - for Rs 5. The prices make you weep.

As you recover from your reverie (the gulab jamuns and jalebis put you in a semi-trance), you notice that the tiny square (clearing/junction) is filled with like-minded people who are busy with their own dron-fulls of bliss. This place might be shabby and unkempt - but the satvik perfume of ghee-and-sugar that pervades all the tiny alleys and lanes more than makes up for the humble surroundings. Despite the 'heart of old Amritsar' location, this palce is easy to find - just ask anyone outside the Golden Temple and they'll give you directions to this treasure trove of goodies - if not walk you there themselves.

I know I am being repetitive - but I cannot stress this enough when I say that a trip to Amristar is futile if you do not sample the gulab jamuns- and more importantly, the jalebis at Katra Ahluwalia. Almost as futile as skipping the Golden Temple or the Wagha Border. Dont miss it.