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Summary
Summary
Go inside the mind of a chef to learn the fundamentals of Indian cuisine and decode the secrets to cooking with spices in this beautiful collection of over 100 timeless recipes.
"This book will exhilarate your senses and invite you to explore the richness of Indian cuisine."-Deepak Chopra
Award-winning chef Anita Jaisinghani of Pondicheri restaurant in Houston, Texas, shows just how easy, delicious, and healthy Indian food can be in this stunning and accessible debut cookbook.
Born and raised in Gujarat, India, Anita's approach to cooking is simple- Following the tenets of ancient Ayurveda, food is seasonal, texture and color are celebrated, and spices are used to enhance, not overwhelm. As the star of Indian cuisine, spices are used from morning to night, in simple infusions, such as cinnamon water for a warming start the day, while cilantro and mint add a cooling balance to a fiery grilled corn salad, and cardamom lends an aromatic sweetness to mango rice pudding. Masala will teach you to think like an Indian chef, revealing the wisdom and techniques to cooking with fresh whole spices- identifying warming versus cooling, what order they should be used, how to temper in hot oil, and much more. Drawing inspiration from every corner of India, these recipes includefermented dosas, sweet and savory chutneys, fragrant chicken, fish, and pork curries, samosas, pakoras, and naans, and pay homage to one of the oldest and most diverse cuisines on the planet. Expect to be wowed with new flavors and combinations, such as Saffron Citrus Pilaf, Coconut Lassi, Jackfruit Masala, Vindaloo Ribs, Avocado Mushroom Chilla, and Smoked Eggplant Raita.
Masala will change the way you think about Indian cooking and the way you use spices in the kitchen.
Author Notes
Anita Jaisinghani is the chef and owner of Pondicheri restaurant in Houston, Texas. Her restaurants have been nominated for five James Beard awards, named best new restaurant by Bon Appetit , listed in the Top 100 in Gourmet magazine, awarded the Best Indian Restaurant in the country by Travel + Leisure , and named at the top of Houston Chronicle 's "25 Best Restaurants" list for nine consecutive years.
Reviews (2)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Jaisinghani, chef and owner of Houston's Pondicheri restaurant, brings an education in microbiology and a passion for the holistic lifestyle known as Ayurveda to bear in this vast and flavorful collection. Creating a "life of balance" by eating the proper foods in the proper combination is key to her approach. She advises, for example, that raw foods should not be eaten with cooked foods because they are "energetically incompatible" and will result in digestive distress. A treatise on Indian cuisine's essential spices explores their three functions--medicinal, preservative, and seasoning--and includes a handy chart listing flavor characteristics and proper pairings. Breakfast pancakes take a savory turn with avocado mushroom chillas, made with chickpea flour and topped with crumbled feta, while a large sampling of street foods include pomegranate pani poori, as well as samosas filled with potato, crabmeat, or grilled corn. Elsewhere, the Indian societal relationship with eating meat, from sacrilegious act to signifier of wealth, is noted in a fascinating preface to a chapter offering such delicacies as vindaloo ribs and hearty sayel goat. Fruity chutneys, traditional breads, and fragrant rice pilafs round out the work, leaving room for desserts like saffron chocolate bread pudding, washed down, perhaps, with a coconut lassi. Mindfulness and spiritual energy prove to be essential ingredients in this insightful guide. (Aug.)
Booklist Review
Jaisinghani brings the culinary world of her Gujarat and Sindh roots to North Americans at her Pondicheri restaurant in Houston. Now she does the same for Indian food and culture enthusiasts across the country in this cookbook that stands apart for its detailed discussions of India's history, the holistic philosophy of Ayurveda, and spices, including how to choose and store them. With dishes like jackfruit masala and chilla (chickpea flour pancake) with avocados and mushrooms, to patra fish and oxtail nihari, to rice pilafs, breads, and a wide assortment of chutneys, recipes span all diets, with possibilities for vegetarians, carnivores, and everyone in between. The author exposes the colonialist gaze upon Indian cookery and reclaims the language and defining characteristics of her homeland's cooking (e.g., though the term curry has no meaning in India, she has accepted the word in her restaurant). Combining cookbook, history lesson, and Ayurvedic primer, Masala highlights a complex culture that offers more through its food landscape than the Western world has often acknowledged.
Excerpts
Excerpts
Introduction Given my insatiable appetite for all matters related to food, my daughter, Ajna, often joked with me, "If I dressed up as a lamb chop, would I get more attention from you?" My cooking journey launched at the dawn of my teenage years; however, a career in food was not considered respectable in India in those days, I was ushered into science. Science came easy, and I learned a lot, but my senses kept pulling me toward the kitchen. My cooking style initially was largely influenced by the cuisine of Sindh, the lost homeland of my parents, and by the food of Gujarat, the state I was born and raised in. When I arrived in Canada as a young bride, a whole new world of food opened for me. By day, I worked as a microbiologist, but by night, I was stalking grocery and international food stores discovering new foods from around the world. I later immigrated to the United States. Fascinated by the new world I was in, yet pining for the culture I came from, I turned my husband and two young children into unsuspecting subjects of my relentless cooking experiments. Annual trips to India to visit family, where I carried tubs of peanut butter and cardamom cookies for my father, punctuated with stops in Europe opened my eyes to a better way of cooking. I became a stay-at-home-mom-run restaurant, regaling my kids with daily changing breakfasts--scones for Ajna today, a paratha tomorrow, Nutella crepes or pancakes for my son, Virag, a rotating variety of naan sandwiches for school lunches, and fresh smoothies and cookies when they would arrive home from school. I found out years later that sometimes Ajna would trade her sandwiches for test answers, and Virag for what he deemed "normal food." To get over their Monday school blues, I would deliver them piping-hot lunches. Seeing how poorly represented Indian food was in Canada and the United States during the eighties and nineties, I resolved to showcase the subcontinent's foods in a better way. I had set the intention; the path would follow. Eventually, I found my way into a career in food, first by catering meals for friends and family, then making fresh chutneys and selling them to Whole Food Markets in Houston. This was followed by a brief stint at the prestigious Annie Café, after which I went on to open two successful restaurants, Indika and Pondicheri. Despite decades of exhaustive cooking with nonstop experimentation, I still have a tremendous sense of curiosity, and every single day, I wake up excited to walk into Pondicheri. Restaurant cooks are some of the toughest people to cook for, but they became my testing ground, and the first time I made pani poori, a quintessential street snack of India, I knew I had a winner on my hands when I would watch them sneak pooris in their mouths --they were intrigued by the flavors and textures! I am at my happiest in the kitchen, and being an intuitive cook, I almost never use recipes and seldom cook the same thing twice, always tinkering with a better way to make it. My philosophy about cooking is that the only way to get better is to keep cooking and get comfortable being in a kitchen. I made a fair amount of not-so-tasty food to arrive at good food. Bound neither by tradition nor a pursuit for authenticity, I use my years of prolific cooking to adjust age-old ideas into today's world. With Masala , I am sharing with you stories of creativity and courage, about blending colonial ingredients with ancestral techniques. While it is hard to distill a culture this vast and diverse into a few recipes, I offer you my best renditions. My recipes are meant to be guides, so take the ideas, move them around, dream up your own versions. After a lifelong love affair with spices, I am here to share the love. And to convince you to add spices to your daily repertoire--this could be as simple as adding a stick of cinnamon into your rice to popping mustard seeds into your favorite soup to creating your own masala. The tiny bit of wisdom I have gleaned from years of being a student of yoga and Ayurveda, I offer you with hope that you will explore further. My dream for this book is that it finds a permanent place in your kitchen and the pages gradually fill up with stains of turmeric, ghee, and such. Happy cooking! Excerpted from Masala: Recipes from India, the Land of Spices [a Cookbook] by Anita Jaisinghani All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
