What Chefs Won't Tell You!!!

This post has all the air of an exposé.

Conspiracy! What are they not telling you?

The truth is a little more mundane. If you put a gun to the head of a professional chef, and asked them the one difference between home cooks and professionals, it wouldn't be about techniques and ingredients, or about sourcing and freshness, or about burners and BTU's.

It would be about salt.

Yes, you heard the CC. Professional chefs understand better than anyone else the importance of salt, and how to deploy it "professionally".

It's a trick, and it has everything to do with how the receptors on your tongue work. To put it bluntly, they use more salt than you, and yet, if they do it right, they'll actually use less salt than you.

Scared yet? You should be!

Whenever the CC has made pasta for friends or readers on the blog, they have frequently commented on how much salt he dumps in the water. But, it's there for a reason. Only a small amount sticks on the surface of the pasta, and it's the surface that counts. In food, you don't get any points for "inner beauty".

The receptors on your tongue fire when they taste the salt. They "saturate" (to borrow an engineering term) and they don't reload right away.

Try this for an experiment. Make a completely salt-less sauce. Taste it. It probably sucks. Now, don't add salt to it but take a spoonful of sauce, sprinkle salt on the surface, and invert the spoon on your tongue.

Taste the magic, O Gentle Reader, taste the magic!

The sauce is entirely unsalted but your tongue doesn't know that. That, O Gentle Reader, makes all the difference in the world!

Armed with this knowledge, the CC leaves you to go out and conquer the world of food. Just remember, you heard it here first!.

India Trip : Day 3

Food at a roadside dhaba.

Quite ordinary stuff - cauliflowers, chickpeas. Note the color of the carrots - they are red, and not quite as sweet as what are found in the US.

Ending the meal is a glass of masala chai, of course.

Skewers

Pictures from Beijing (courtesy of a friend of the CC's), who knows the CC's omnivorous tendencies.

Made for fascinating discussion over dim sum in Flushing (pictures of which will be posted at a later date.)

Dictionary of Japanese Food

This is an amazing book!

It's comprehensive in its approach to Japanese food ingredients, had tons of appendices to delve into all the obscure details ("what constitutes sansai?") and gives the food terms in both hiragana and kanji (when applicable.)

It's a dictionary not a recipe book but it's one of the best buys the CC has ever made. It's also quite cheap.

Haul thee to a library!

Tamarind Etymology

The fruit and the taste are well known enough. Less well known is the etymology.

The Arabs encountered it first, and found they visually resembled dates (tamr). Hence, tamr-al-hind (dates of Hind = India.)

From there on to Latin - tamarindus and tamarind in English.

The botanical name is tamarindus indica which would equate to "dates of india from india".

Shades of Major Major Major Major?

India Trip : Day 1 : Post 5

This is khandvi, a Gujarati staple and specialty.

Silky smooth in texture, and spicy in taste, it was demolished within minutes of arrival (yes, you bastards! you know exactly who you are!!!)

But why not? It's a masterpiece of conception, execution and delivery.

First up, in involves chickpea flour, spices and water and blended over heat into a thick batter. Then, the batter is spread out real thin onto flat oiled surfaces while it is still hot, and left to cool.

The batter which dries up is then rolled into thin rolls which are sliced.

Following that, oil is heated to a high temperature, and mustard tossed into it. This hot mixture is then poured all over the (sliced) rolls.

Khandvi
Incidentally, this technique of frying spices in hot oil and pouring on or into dishes -- baghar or tadka -- which perfumes the entire dish with the spices is the only unique innovation that Indian cuisine has ever made.

This is not as pejorative as it sounds - all the other techniques - roasting, steaming, frying - arise all over the globe. In fact, the Indians were taught the concept of steaming by the Chinese traders in the 10th century.

An innovation at this basic level is extraordinarily high praise indeed!

Ol' School Beer Pong

Think fratboy drinking games are something new? Think again, kiddo!

This is a wine/mead game c. 1570.

You get to blow into the pipe which makes the sails of the windmill churn, fill the glass, and chug, chug, chug. Behind the windmill is a "timer" with numbers. If you can't finish before the sails of the windmill stop, you get to drink as many glasses as indicated on the timer.

(Source: V&A Museum, London.)

India Trip : Day 1 : Post 4

This is dal pakwan, a Sindhi breakfast delicacy.

Pakwan are made of maida (refined wheat flour - that shit that's bad for you), salt, pepper and ajwain. It's deep-fried (DUH!)

Daal is a spicy concoction made with chana daal (different from chickpeas) and quite spicy.

How to eat it should be obvious from below!

India Trip : Day 1 : Post 3

We've encountered this one before.

Ponkh (or hurda in Marathi) are the young kernels of sorghum (jowar.) They are roasted and are absolutely delicious. A seasonal speciality and one not to be missed.

The sev is black-pepper laden chickpea flour that has been fried.

Ponkh
Sev
Ponkh and Sev

India Trip : Day 1 : Post 2

First up, the Gujarati combination of sweet and savory. Jalebi-Gaanthia.

Jalebi refers to a disgustingly sweet (and highly addictive) combination of fried spiced wheat dough dunked in the saturated sugar solution. Note the use of the word "saturated". It's not enough to have a sugar syrup. You must heat it to a high temperature so that more sugar can dissolve. You might as well label the product "Death to Diabetics!" but it's delicious!

Gaanthia refer to the highly-spiced chickpea-flour batter that is spiced. They are extremely crumbly and totally addictive. Particularly with the jalebi's above.

Jalebi
Gaanthia

India Trip : Day 1 : Post 1

Well, there are several ways to do this - thematically, by color, by type of food but in the interest of linear narrative (sadly much maligned), the CC is gonna narrate chronologically (or borderline chronologically - sometimes you gotta shake things up a bit for artistic reasons!)

Qu'est que c'est?


A steaming cup of masala chai (and a newspaper, natch!) to wake you up. Laced with spices (cloves, cinnamon, cardamom, black pepper) and a hefty dose of ginger, if there's a defining drink of the pan-Indian experience, it's this one.

Fractious in all other respects, Indians of all ages, sexes, classes and stripes consume endless cups of this elixir at all hours of the day. (Mathematicians of all stripes will undoubtedly observe the quintuplet of universal quantifiers in the last statement.)

And, it's pretty safe to drink even on the street because the tea is boiled - so there!

Bengali Cookbook Authenticity Gauge-Meter

There's a shockingly simple way to gauge it.

Just peruse through and check their ingredients for panch phoran (five spices.)

If it features radhuni, it is authentic. If it features mustard seeds, it is not.

For the record, panch phoran consists of radhuni, cumin, fenugreek, fennel and kalonji.

Life can be so simple sometimes.

Lemons, Limes, Oranges

Why is this picture here?

Because it's cool, and because we all need a touch of surrealism in our life!

Adventures in India : The Return

The CC is back.

With a few hundred pictures of food!

But (and there's always a but, isn't there?) these need to be sorted and processed so your indulgence is begged while the blog (and the blogger) can restart operations.