Master the World's Greatest Comfort Food
Few meals are as transportive and satisfying as one in a good Indian restaurant. Each dish carries exotic ingredients that convey richness, savoriness, and spiciness all at once. But cook the stuff at home, and you're looking at an exercise in frustration. Believe me, I've tried. That subtle interplay of spices, those unfolding waves of warming heat? Not at my house. Maybe this cuisine is better left to the masters, I figured. Then I found a master of my own: Sudhir Seth, who owns the D.C.-area restaurants Passage to India and Spice Xing. After hearing my tales of curry-making anxiety, he invited me into his home to learn his lessons.
1. Seek Out Secret Weapons
Many of the ingredients Seth has arranged on his countertop when I arrive are familiar to me: a box of defrosted spinach for creamy palak paneer, garbanzo beans for zesty chana masala, and canned tomatoes for robust chicken curry. But Seth also has a few exotic ingredients on hand. We'd pair the spinach with a soft block of paneer, a mild Indian cheese that tastes great seared in a hot pan or on the grill. Chana masala powder would perfume the garbanzo beans. So what if these items required a trip to a specialty market? These ingredients transformed basic products into the curries I craved.
2. "Bloom" Your Spices
The potent fragrances of Indian food emerge from one simple technique: blooming. You start by heating oil in a pan until it begins to ripple, and then you toss in, say, whole cumin. (Mustard seeds, curry leaves, or cinnamon sticks work, too.) You want the oil hot enough that the seeds pop, but not so hot that they burn. To make the palak paneer, Seth and I blister the cumin seeds in the oil, releasing their earthy scent. "If they're not popping," Seth says, "we're not doing it right." Apart from tantalizing the nose, the heated spice also infuses the oil with flavor, which eventually permeates the finished curry.
3. Put Down Your Roots
French food builds flavor with a mirepoix (onions, carrots, celery); Creole has the "trinity" (onions, bell peppers, celery). Indian cooking has what we'll call the three roots: onions, ginger, garlic. Combined, they lend sweetness, bitterness, and body to curries. At Seth's direction, I shovel two heaping spoonfuls of premade ginger-garlic paste into the pan. That's the equivalent of chopping a dozen-plus cloves of garlic and a couple of knobs of ginger. "Another reason I like to use the paste at home," he says. (You'll save yourself some sweat.)
4. Rethink Meat and Seasoning
By the time Seth and I add the cubes of chicken breast to our curry (there's no need to sear the meat before you add it to the curry ... trust us), the protein seems like an afterthought. The bird is merely the delivery system for the luscious gravy. After we finish cooking the curries, we sprinkle garam masala over each of them like salt. Seth is quick to point out that we aren't seasoning the meat (no offense to the chicken); we're deepening the existing flavors of the curry. Just a pinch of the complex, aromatic spice seduces the senses. Then Seth tosses in a handful of freshly chopped cilantro to add a pop of brightness.
And then we eat. The chicken is astonishingly juicy for breast meat—especially breast meat that hasn't marinated overnight. The once-bland garbanzos have taken on the flavor of the chana masala powder and taste as if they've cooked all day. The spinach is so much more rich and lustrous than it had been in its box. This is what cooking is: the transformation of cheap raw materials into something greater than the constituent parts. As I heap seconds onto my plate, Seth regards me with the beneficent expression with which a guru looks upon his dutiful pupil. "Next time," he says, "it's all you. Are you ready?" "Ready and raring to go," I say. Or at least that's what I was trying to say through a large mouthful of chana masala.
