My curry of choice is always the rogan josh. It’s solid and dependable, the backbone of Indian cookery, unpretentious, hot but not overpowering, deeply flavoured and intense. It’s a proper curry. I’ve made variations on the rogan josh with chicken, lamb, mutton and the decidedly unauthentic and borderline sacrilegious beef. Each produces a different result, [...]
A common Indian, specifically Moghal, technique is to cook a lot of onions separately and add them to a curry dish during the last few minutes of cooking. This has the effect of substantially altering the taste and consistency of the dish…the end product is something of a surprise to the diligent cook who has [...]
Everybody has a couple of cookbooks that are just a little bit more stained and greasy than the rest, books that have seen more distinguished service than all the others on the shelf. I have two – the distinctly unfashionable Delia’s Complete Cookery Course by Delia Smith, which I grew up with and still refer [...]
I’m a huge fan of Madhur Jaffrey’s recipes, which combine great food with a rich appreciation of its cultural context. An understanding of the way food has developed over time adds an extra layer of authenticity, especially with a cuisine as steeped in tradition as that of India. Jaffrey delivers this context flawlessly, combining observations [...]
My regular Asian supermarket had a huge pile of chopped mutton shoulder, displayed in that haphazard way characteristic of those sort of places, so I took a kilo without really knowing what to do with it. I vaguely remembered Gordon Ramsey banging on about mutton (underrated, hardly used, etc) and doing something North African with [...]