/ck/ - Food & Cooking

>>19799889
Good morning sir I await

>>19799889
Good morning, sir!
Good luck on your dish, I wish do the needful and monitor this thread, sir

>>19799889
Ingredients from left to right, top to bottom
Ginger garlic paste (I apologize for my laziness)
Kashmiri chilli powder (it's kind of like paprika with a little heat)
Garam masala (an Indian Spice blend, name translates to warm spice)
Corriander powder
Turmeric powder
Whole cinnamon sticks
Salt
Can of tomatoes
Ghee (ghee has a good flavor and cooking with it will keep the seed oil schizos out of your threads)
Onions (inb4 someone complains I'm not using red onions)
Indian bay leaves (they're bigger and have a different flavor than western bay leaves)
Serrano peppers (they generally work fine in Indian food. I didn't want to run to the Indian grocery store for some green finger chillis)
Corriander (cilantro)

The most important ingredient in an egg curry, eggs, was not listed or shown above. Before doing any of the other cooking, I cooked the eggs. I use the Serious Eats method of cooking eggs: https://www.seriouseats.com/the-secrets-to-peeling-hard-boiled-eggs

Indians usually eat their eggs cooked way harder than Americans do. I'm not a fan of the ultra-hard boiled style of eggs so I cooked them just a tiny bit passed soft boiled and transferred them to ice water.

>>19799908
>>19799911
Thank you, sirs

After prepping your ingredients (I finely chopped the onions and tomatoes and slit the Serrano pepper and measured out my dry spices and salt) the next step in a lot of Indian recipes is to temper your whole spices by cooking them in oil. I added some ghee to the pan and once it was hot added in a stick of cinnamon, a bay leaf, and some whole green cardamom.

Once that was done, I added the onions and the slit Serrano chilli to the pan. For a smoother gravy, you can blend your onions and tomatoes. Slit chillis add heat and flavor to your recipes without as much heat as chopped chillis would. This dish came out surprisingly hot for only using one slit Serrano pepper.

Once the onions got a little brown color to them, I added ginger garlic paste, cooked the paste for a few minutes until the "raw" smell went away, and added the tomatoes.

>>19799955
I added spices, mixed everything well, cooked until the oil started to separate a little bit, then added in some water, let it simmer, and peeled my eggs.

>>19799959
Oops, forgot pic of it with the water

>>19799955
I didn't mention this earlier, but I use canned tomatoes most of the time because they're always better than out of season tomatoes. Even in season grocery store tomatoes in America are god awful because they've been bred for transport and durability rather than flavor. Canned tomatoes are made from better tomatoes that are canned right after they're picked. If you want good tomatoes in America you have to grow your own or buy them at a farmer's market.

Here are the boiled eggs after I peeled them. As you can see from the broken one (the other part of it fell in the dirty sink so I threw it out) these eggs are still pretty soft.

>>19799975
My peeling technique: after the eggs have soaked in ice water for awhile, lightly crack them all over with a spoon, slide the spoon just under the shell, and use the spoon to help get the peel off. It's not always the most elegant, but it's quicker than peeling the shell off with your fingers.

While the egg curry was very gently simmering, I got to work on the rice. The rice was almost done when I took this picture of ingredients.

Ingredients shown here used in the lemon rice:
Turmeric powder
Urad Dal (the whitish looking stuff in the bag. It's made by removing the hull from black gram which is a type of bean. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vigna_mungo )
Hing (asafoetida)
Slit serrano pepper
Mustard seed
dried red chillis

There are more ingredients that I will show soon,

>>19799924
>I cooked them just a tiny bit passed soft boiled
based, was never a fan of hard-boiled eggs on my biryani

Another ingredient: curry leaves.

Curry leaves are an aromatic leaf that have sort of a citrusy flavor. It's not easy to describe and there isn't really a good comparison. I generally treat curry leaves like bay leaves and don't eat them. This isn't a universal rule though, some people do eat them.

You can find them at your local Indian grocery store.

The basmati rice for the lemon rice. I cooked it a little bit stickier than ideal. Indian rice generally shouldn't be sticky like Chinese rice.

I cooked up some peanuts for the lemon rice earlier in the day. I like to buy bags of raw peanuts at the Indian grocery store because it's cheaper than buying them from the bulk section at regular grocery stores. Cooking/frying peanuts yourself is satisfying and you can cook them to your desired preference. I roasted these earlier in the day in a frying pan with just a teaspoon or so of ghee. I did the same thing with some cashew pieces. Some people will bitch about the fact that I kept the skins on. I don't mind the skins.

Lemon rice ingredients not pictured: Salt and lemon. I juiced two very small lemons and got about 2 tablespoons of lemon juice from them.

The next step was to temper spices. I generally don't take pictures of myself tempering because I like to keep things moving in the pan and keep a close eye on things so I don't burn things.

My tempering process for this recipe:
Heat ghee (or oil) in the pan until it's hot
Add mustard seeds to hot ghee and cook until they're sputtering
Add the urad dal and cook until it's golden (I lowered the heat a little and kept stirring, if you burn your ingredients while tempering you'll need to start over)
Add the red chillis, slit Serrano pepper, and curry leaves
Cook for a bit and add in the hing and turmeric. Remove from heat and stir until the turmeric and hing and "dissolved."
I added the tempered spices and oil to the rice along with the lemon juice, peanuts, cashews, and salt. I mixed everything up well (all the rice should take on a yellowish color from the turmeric), let it sit for just a little bit, and served with the eggs.

As they say in French: Wahlah!

A note on the eggs:
I added them back to the gravy for a little bit to heat them before serving. The more traditional Indian way would be to take your already hard hard boiled eggs (optional: cook the hard boiled eggs even more in a frying pan with oil to brown them) slit them, and cook them more in the gravy even more.

I didn't slit my eggs because they were so soft that they'd have broken at that point. I've never actually done a taste test to see how much flavor the eggs soak up from the gravy and whether slitting the eggs actually matters. I suspect that cooking them longer in the gravy doesn't actually do anything and that it no matter how long you cook they still just get a bit of a surface coating.

Here's the inside of my eggs after reheating them in the gravy, probably a bit longer than necessary to just warm them back up. They're not overcooked though, they're still flexible and the yolk was cooked through but still fairly soft.

The verdict: the lemon rice and the egg curry both tasted good. There are a huge number of ways to make egg curry. I might make another one for you guys soon.

I like to say a prayer for Ganesha and offer him some food before I cook. He enjoys sweet things. Here's an old picture of when I offered him some Rockstar Zero Sugar energy drink. Hopefully he wasn't mad that it wasn't the full sugar version.

>>19800233
thank you! looks great!

>>19800233
Good results.
Dear sir, kindly wash and soak your basmati rice for at least 30 minutes before cooking, and add a pinch of salt when cooking, this will help remove excess starch and stickiness from the??? Rice.

Namaste, asalam malykum, sawasdee khrap and sat sri akal.

>>19799889
Educational. Thanks

Interesting, presented in normal English and in a sanitary environment, Indian food seems appealing.
Thank you sir and many joyous hours you may have today until I will bid you Good night sir

>>19800235
>>19800254
>>19800313
>>19800365
Thank you, sirs

>>19800441
Well done, sir.

>>19800122
Thank you for showing me that curry leaves exist in these threads, sir, including them has substantially improved the curries I make at home.

I love cook-along threads, thanks OP

>>19799913
Never understood the criticism of not using red onions. Most curries have onions caramalized to such an extent that you wouldn't taste the difference anyway.

Using fresh spices that are toasted correctly, frying the ground spices in oil
without burning them and caramalizing your onions enough contribute more to the flavor.

t. Turkroach who loves south asian food

>>19799889
why is your kashmiri chili powder so brown? it's supposed to be the brightest red

>>19799913
Sorry, I'm an immigrant from /ic/, what on earth is a seed oil schizo?

I just bought Indian food at the farmers market, when I opened the dish it smelled like wet fart and now I can't stop thinking of all those videos I've seen of Indians eating with their fingers and eating poop and stuff. Do you think this guy even washed his hands before squirming his fingers in my food? It's also not that good

>>19800783
What kind of farmer's market serves Indian food, wet fart or otherwise?

>>19799908
>>19799911
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>>19799924
>>19799925
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>>19799955
>>19799959
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>>19799975
>>19799976
>>19800068
>>19800075
>>19800122
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>>19800233
>>19800235
>>19800254
>>19800313
>>19800365
>>19800441
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>>19800625
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>>19800768
>>19800783
>>19800790
Good Morning Sirs

>>19800768

>>19800790
It's a really big farmers market, like 80% of it is produce stalls normal shit, but then at one end they have a bunch of food stalls.

>>19800800
Which dish in particular did you purchase?

>>19800803
chicken tikka masala combo. comes with a bed of yellow rice with some shredded meat mixed in that and lots of veggies, then a little portion of some sweet curry with potato and other veggies mixed through out. very well spiced

>>19799955
>ginger
Dropped quicker than a cactus

>>19800805
Is this the very first time you've tried Indian food? It's certainly a different flavor/odor profile than normal foods. Otoh, it could very well have been the anal slime of the preparer you were tasting.

>>19800818
No I've eaten Indian quite a lot, I like it. I think just seeing this Indian guy in the stall serving my food creeped me out. Normally I just get it delivered. He had his little kid running the cash register. I'm just imaging him taking a shit and not washing his hands before he goes to chop up all the veggies and handle the meat with his bare hands

>>19800506
Thank you, sir

>>19800625
The weird thing about freakouts about using non-red onions in Indian food is that the red onions available in America are not a 1-1 match with the red onions found in India. They have the same color, but don't quite have the same taste. The red onions found in India are much smaller and tend to have a bit pinker of a color than the red onions in American including the ones at Indian grocery stores in America.

>>19800768
There are weirdos people on /ck/ who are convinced that seed oils (oil extracted from seeds like canola oil, vegetable oil, soybean oil, etc.) and love telling everyone about it. There's a lot of overlap between them and the idiots who won't shut up about keto diets.

>>19800701
My phone's camera doesn't do a very good job of capturing colors and my kitchen doesn't have great lighting. My kashmiri chilli powder is a lot more vibrant than it looks in the pictures.

>>19800808
What's wrong with ginger?

>>19800836
I like your picture sir, are you coming from San Francisco, I hear the streets there are like your picture.
Good evenings.

>>19800842
Note: it is possible some Indian grocery stores in America get red onions more like the ones found in India, but the Indian grocery stores in my area don't.

I'll try to do another cook-a-long next week. I don't usually eat a lot of meat, but I have some goat and shrimp in my freezer that I plan to eat next week.

>>19800794
Good morning, sir

>>19799889
Thank you Sir for informative and in-depth tutorial.

>>19800223
You could deep fry the eggs to make the outside crispy and that would help it get more gravy to adhere to it.

>>19800982
It'd probably taste great, but I really hate deep frying at home. It's not a big deal that the eggs don't absorb a bunch of the gravy because you can still get gravy and egg on your fork at the same time for the ultimate bite of egg curry.

>>19800909
You are welcome, sir

looks super yummy OP, 10/10 would eat. would love to dip naan (do indians dip naan into curry? i just dont know) into the curry,

>>19801299
Yes. Generally, you tear off a piece and use it to scoop up and eat your food. In Indian homes, roti, a flatbread that's pretty much just a tortilla made with whole wheat flour, is a lot more common than naan. I've never actually made naan at home and my mom never made it when I was growing up. Almost every meal is served with roti or rice.

A few things most Indians wouldn't do:
pick up the whole roti or naan and dunk it rather than tearing a piece off
use roti or naan to scoop up and eat rice.

>>19801390
awesome thanks for the info, super informative thread, this is what /ck is supposed to be about

i made this the other day

https://www.allrecipes.com/recipe/212721/indian-chicken-curry-murgh-kari/

i love curry