My Long Love Affair With Indian Food

I want to go on record RIGHT NOW as saying Indian food, in all of its iterations, in all of its regional variations, in all of its incarnations, is my absolute, drop-dead, stop-everything, hold-the-presses favorite cuisine.

Well…..OK.  Except for maybe Thai.  Or Mexican.  Or Chinese.  Or Cajun/Creole.  Or Vietnamese.  Or Italian.  Or Middle-Eastern.  Or Greek.  Well, you get the drift.

But Indian is really, really, REALLY close to the top.

The fact of the matter is I like Indian food a lot.  A lot.  A whole lot.  I love Moghul food.  I love vindaloos.  I love biriyanis.  I love tandoor-cooked food, like chicken tikka and lamb kebabs.  I love Punjabi food, and Keralan food and Goan food.  I just love Indian food.  From all the ethnic and religious influences and differences comes a marvelous abundance of styles of cooking, flavors and play of spices I don’t think you’ll find in many other “national” cuisines.  Almost every time I eat “Indian” food (and with such a culturally and ethnically and religiously diverse land, it’s almost hard to classify it as a singular cuisine), I am amazed and delighted by the range of flavors presented on my plate.  Indian cooks have such a talent in using spices to bring depth and complexity to their food, I’m in awe with every bite.

I first fell in love with Indian food a bazillion years ago.  I was working for a small biotech company whose owner was Indian, from what region, I sadly never bothered to learn (what can I say, I was a snot-nosed, know-it-all-straight-out-of-college jerk who had no use for “old” folks).  His wife, who was Swedish (an *interesting* relationship to say the least) was an outstanding cook, and also worked at the company.  The chief chemist was also Indian (again, from what region I have no clue…my loss).  Eventually, his wife, who was also from India and a strict vegetarian, also came to work for us.  She too, was an amazing cook…totally from the soul, and totally without recipes.

By that time, my boss had taken my co-worker and me to several “thank-you” lunches at his favorite, local Indian dives.  In the area where the company was located, there was a large number of Indian immigrants.  The first time he took my cohort and me to an Indian lunch, we were a bit…skeptical.  After all, she was from Te-jas, and I was from SoCal.  This was truly foreign territory for us.  But as soon as we smelled the smells, and tasted the naan, and ate the food…..the sputtering tandoori chicken, like the most exotic fajitas you ever ate, and the luxurious pilaf and the creamy dal and the cool, soothing raita, we were hooked.

And then The Swedish Wife and The Indian Wife would bring leftover food in from home for their lunches, and when my counterpart (Hi Judi !) and I would go up to the lunch room, we’d literally be salivating, with our eyeballs rotating around in our heads like a cartoon character over the smells coming from the microwave.   And we’d beg for any small, minute, scanty little sample we could score.

Eventually The Swedish Wife and The Indian Wife both took pity on us greenhorns, and started bringing us lunch on a fairly regular basis.  And those were some of the most spectacular lunches I had in way, too many years of being a working stiff.

Thus began my long love affair with the cuisines of India.

In Search of "Naan-vana"

One of my favorite things about eating in good Indian restaurants is the basket of naan bread they bring you when you sit down.  Hot, steamy and charred from the tandoor, usually painted with ghee, it’s a savory prologue to the deliciousness of the Indian meal to come.  And it’s so great alongside the meal, to sop up the spicy, flavorful sauces.

I think naan was one of the reasons I fell hard in love with Indian cuisines.  After all, I am, first and foremost, a carb freak.

Naan is a flat bread, and puffs in the middle to form a pocket similar to a pita.  The two are very different animals, though.  I feel the pita is somehow “sturdier”, and the naan a bit more delicate.  Naan typically have dairy in their recipes (usually yogurt, but sometimes milk, or both), and most recipes require an egg, as does this one.  Pita breads don’t use eggs or dairy, hence (hence???  HENCE???? Where the heck did HENCE come from?) the more delicate crumb of the naan.

Naan is difficult to recreate at home because, unless you’re very, very lucky, or very, very dedicated, or more likely, very, very obsessed, you don’t have a tandoor in the backyard.

Confession time….if I win the Lotto tomorrow, I'll *HAVE* a tandoor in the backyard.  And a wood burning pizza oven.  Of course, it won’t be in THIS backyard, but I’ll have them in whatever multi-acre backyard I purchase with my MegaMillions.

Tandoor ovens are cylindrical (usually beehive shaped) clay ovens fueled with a live charcoal or wood fire.  There’s a grill above the fire level.  Tandoors are used to make some of the most iconic Indian dishes, most notably (along with naan), tandoori chicken.  Skewered meats can also be cooked in a tandoor.  The intense heat from the fire below, plus the radiant heat from the clay walls, crusts the outside of the proteins into charry, smoky lusciousness, while keeping the interior moist and juicy because the intense heat cooks so fast.

Naan is “baked” by slapping the dough onto the sides of the oven, then pulling them off with a long hook  Since temperatures in the tandoor can exceed 900°F (yeee-IKES), no matter how we hack our home oven, or how long we preheat it and our baking stone, we’re not gunna achieve that.  But seriously, if Lady Lotto finds me, making authentic naan would be worth the tsuris of installing a tandoor.

So.  What can we do with our feeble home ovens?  Well, it’s not necessarily “authentic”, but it’s pretty darn good, and it did PUFF, so I claim success.