DIY fine-dining

The Imperial, Delhi, tries its best to turn you into a master chef.

From expecting to eat gourmet food at restaurants, many have graduated to wanting to sample the same high-quality fare at home as well. Enter, the Imperial Culinary Club, an initiative that Delhi’s Hotel Imperial has started to help you bone up on recipes from different cuisines, so that when you do step into the kitchen you are able to make the finest foods. Held every fortnight, the Imperial Culinary Club has already completed two sessions before I attend the Kashmiri food cook-out, the third in the series.

 

As is well known, Kashmiri cuisine is meat-centric. It is also time-consuming, requiring several hours of preparation before a full meal is ready to serve. For the gushtaba, for instance, the meat has to be pounded for at least an hour and a half before it is ready to be cooked. The flavours in Kashmiri cuisine also come from unique ingredients that are available in the Valley, but now, of course, can also be easily procured from Delhi’s INA market.

The session has some hiccups. The recipes that have been given out don’t match what the guest chef is making. The recipes are full of errors (there are several delightful errors: in the nadroo yakhni recipe, a line at the end exhorts you, cryptically, to “add nadroo and make it hot”) and the method over-simplified. The chef also improvises with the ingredients, much to the consternation of the participants. But the general manager and vice president of the hotel, Vijay Wanchoo, himself a Kashmiri as well as a chef, manages to soothe ruffled feathers and keep the show going.

Once the dishes are ready and we troop in to eat, one thing becomes clear about Kashmiri cuisine — it isn’t diet-friendly. And, normally, the ladies who lunch — the mainstay of clubs like this one (though the hotel says they also get hotel guests), are those who survive on water and dry bread.

But all tucked in, despite the generous helpings of fatty ingredients that have gone into the meal. The winter months are, however, a good time to experiment with Kashmiri food. So, we offer you some recipes that you can try at home during this season.

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FAVOURITE RECIPES

TABAK MAAZ
1,600 gm ribs
2 lt water
15 gm whole black cardamom
10 gm haldi
50 gm saunf
20 gm whole cinnamon
200 gm ghee
15 gm whole green cardamom
15 gm jeera
600 ml milk
200 gm curd
40 gm garlic paste
10 gm ginger powder
Salt

Blanch ribs. Heat milk and rest of ingredients, except ghee, together. Keep on flame till milk evaporates completely. Then stir-fry ribs using ghee as cooking medium. Cook till ribs have a golden crust on both sides. Pour over masala, and serve hot.

GUSHTABA
1,600 gm mutton leg, boneless
100 gm fat
A pinch of dry pudina
50 gm besan
10 gm blue cardamom
30 gm saunf powder
500 gm curd
10 gm black cardamom powder
10 gm green cardamom
30 gm garlic paste
5 gm green cardamom
50 gm desi ghee
A pinch of Kashmiri jeera
Salt

Clean mutton leg well and cut into cubes. Using wooden hammer, beat cubes on a flat stone and simultaneously add fat and salt as per taste. Then add black cardamom and mix it properly. The beating process takes almost one and a half hours for this quantity. Now make small balls out of this mixture and boil in a bowlful of water for 15-20 minutes or till balls are cooked.

Mix besan and curd well. Add cinnamon, green cardamom, Kashmiri jeera and some water. Boil mixture till properly cooked. Now add saunf powder, black cardamom powder, garlic paste and again boil all this for a further five or six minutes. Now add mutton balls and remaining water to gravy and boil for 10 more minutes. Add desi ghee, green cardamom powder and dry pudina. Serve hot.