Why does restaurant food taste so good? And how to make food that tastes like restaurant food.Part 1

Ever thought why the butter chicken from the restaurant tastes so much better than the butter chicken that we make in our home?

Being a chef, today I will be revealing various techniques used by chefs and khansamas (who used to cook for the kings).

The techniques that I am going tell you today can be used in any dish if kept in mind and will help you to make any dish taste even better.

 

If you look at the menu of any Indian restaurant you will see there are three main methods of cooking or three main utensils used for cooking which is:

 

1.    Tawa- heard of tawa pulao? A tawa has a large surface area and when we spread the food on the hot tawa very fast it gives a kind of caramelized(maillard reaction) flavor to any tawa dish.

2.    Handi- the famous chicken handi and mutton Nihari! Handi
is used for larger quantities of gravy which is liquidy in nature(it also retains the water in the dish due to its shape), food made in handi has the longest cooking time from three of these methods.

            Kadhai- chiken kadhai and the masaledar paneer tikka masala, every ones favorite right! The kadhai is used for dishes with thick gravy like kadhai paneer. The food is not cooked for very long and nor the heat is as direct as the tawa, it fits right in the middle(thus used so much in our homes), the main ingredient( paneer or chicken) is generally pre cooked and it is only heated once in the gravy.

 

So now you know what you are going to get when you order one of these in the restaurant, and what utensil you should use when you cook something like this ;).

 

Guys this was the part 1, in part 2 I will be explaining that main aspect why does the restaurant food actually tastes better and what you have to take care of. I will be explaining the three main aspects

·       1.When to put the onion.

·      2. How much to fry the onion.

·      3. When to put in the salt.

·       4.And more ;)

 

Thank you so much guys for reading my blog, it will give me immense pleasure if I was able make a small difference in your daily cooking methods.

Chef Abhishek Naidu

 

 

Importance of traditional cooking utensils.

Today I came to my aunt’s place and she asked me to crack open a coconut when I did it, at that moment my sister asked for some morning chai so my aunt asked us, “do you guys know that we could make chai in the coconut shell that Abhishek just opened”

The chai tasted amazing ;)

I was absolutely amazed and thought that it would be a great idea to write an interesting blog on ‘traditional cooking pots.

Ever thought why does food taste better when our grandmother cooks for us in the village? Why do people still like food cooked in earthen pot?

It is because natural elements like earthen pots have no chemicals in them and would never react with any element of the food. Furthermore our grandmas always use the organic ingredients grown in the village which is mostly not mass produced. Mass produced fruits and vegetables will always have less flavour and less nutritional value.

Why does a fried fish taste better when fried on a cast iron pan rather than on a non-stick pan?

On another instance when I was at my native place Kerala, my mama (mom’s brother)

brought some fresh fish from the fish market and told my mom to fry it, my mom fried it on a non-stick pan and gave it to him and his first reaction after tasting the fish was ‘it doesn’t taste that good’ and went ahead and said ‘you didn't fry it on a cast iron pan, did you?’

I was amazed how he got to know it wasn’t fried on a cast iron, later I tried it myself and found that the sweetness of the caramelization is missing (also known as the maillard reaction), all of these things have made me realised as a chef that how important it is to use the right utensil to cook the right food, as it could impact the texture as well as the taste.

As a person belonging to the culinary world my opinion that we should go back to using traditional utensils for flavourful taste and added health benefits.

Traditional coconut shell tea recipe explored

by chef Abhishek Naidu.

½ coconut shell

½cup water

½cup milk

1 tbsp tea powder

1½ tbsp sugar

1 Cardamom.

¼ Inch ginger

Keep the coconut shell on the gas stove (low flame)

Add in the tea powder, cardaom and ginger(crushed)

Heat till it comes to a boil

Then add in the milk

Heat it for around 5minutes and your coconut shell tea is ready.

Hope you found the blog interesting and informative. :)

The real unheard Indian cuisine.

Hi guys, being a culinary arts student I thought it would be a great idea to share my knowledge about what was the real Indian cuisine before India got invaded by various rulers, as this is a topic which many people don’t know, I thought it would be a great idea to enlighten people about it.

So now I will start with clearing up the biggest controversial topic of India that is meat eating and beef eating in ancient India.

Historically, all Indians used to eat all sorts of meat including red meat (written in Indian scared writing ‘Rig Veda’) till Gautam Buddha rebelled against this tradition of beef eating. But the only female species of the cattle was consumed that too during rituals or when welcoming a guest or a person of high status. There are some misconceptions that Indians were thought to eat meat by the Mughals which is absolutely not true furthermore there were quite a few Mughals rulers like Aurangzeb who were actually vegetarian.

 

Now to the next topic,

Did you know that Indians have only been eating chicken or fowl meat from past 200 years? Yes we Indians were introduced to chicken by the Britishers and only have been eating chicken after that, yet going to claim that tandoori chicken is purely an Indian dish? ;) So basically if Britishers didn’t give us chicken then we won’t have tandoori chicken, sad right? Also matter of fact the style of tandoori worked really well with meats like chicken due to its high heat properties of cooking which gave us such numerous tasty dishes.

Also there are many vegetables and spices that we think are ours but it isn’t. I will start by naming a few and who brought it to us.

Portuguese- Tomato, Potato, Chilies, Bell peppers, nutmegs, cloves, cinnamon, ginger, and peppercorns.

Britishers- cauliflower, tea and orange carrots.

Thinking how we would get pav bhaji and samosa without these ingredients?

Now I will be telling you about some ingredients which we had before any invaders came to India.

Bottle gourd, bitter gourd, snake gourd, okra, eggplant, cluster beans, lotus stems, radish, fenugreek, spinach, mustard, gooseberry, sweet potato etc. are all vegetables that are used extensively in contemporary Indian cooking and yes even mushrooms. (According to various ayurvedic texts)

In the most ancient Indian cuisine spices like long pepper known as pipli was used for hot tastes, and nutmeg, asafoetida (heeng), turmeric, ginger powder, dry mango powder, tamarind, camphor, and cumin were used. But now long pepper is rarely used in few recipes like potli masala from the Mughlai cuisine.

So guys I will sign off from here, thank you for reading my blog, hope you like it, if you want to know anything related to any cuisine you can let me know, thank you.

Abhishek Naidu.