Indian Recipes
345 recipes found
Chakundari Chicken Tikka
Roasted Cauliflower, Paneer and Lentil Salad
The Indian cheese paneer doesn’t typically show up in salads, but this one from food writer Nik Sharma’s cookbook, “Season,” involves cutting paneer into cubes and roasting it alongside cauliflower for about 25 minutes (though doing so for longer wouldn’t hurt). Paneer maintains its structure in heat, so its skin will come out of the oven charred, its insides still soft. You’ll stir the paneer and cauliflower with green and black lentils, cooked and drained, and scallions, resulting in a pleasing jumble of textures. Drizzle it with a cilantro-lime dressing, which gives the salad a tart kick.
Sambhar Masala
Raghavan Iyer, the author of "The Turmeric Trail" and teacher who was born in Mumbai and came to the United States as a young man, says there as many sambhar masalas as there are kitchens in south India. The spice mix is used to flavor sambhar, the ubiquitous thin stew of Southern India. If you can’t find the curry leaves, you can leave them out, but it’s worth it to search out a South Asian or international grocery or order some online. Use it in curries, stir-fries or simple dishes of roasted or grilled vegetables. It can be rubbed onto meat before grilling or stirred into mashed potatoes enriched with melted butter. The recipe can easily be doubled and keeps well. Do not refrigerate as it will cake.
Spicy Grilled Chicken With Tomato-Cucumber Relish
Chicken thighs meet with a mellow mix of Indian spices and are grilled into weekend dinner excellence. In Indian cooking, most spices are toasted before they’re used, a process that brings up their aromatics and mellows and rounds their flavors. Here they’re then rubbed onto chicken thighs and grilled, which gives them an additional smokiness that pairs beautifully with the tomato-and-cucumber relish.
Chicken Tikka
Traditionally, Indian chicken tikka — skewered boneless chicken pieces that have been marinated in assertive spices and cooling yogurt — is cooked in a clay tandoor oven, stacking layers of smoke upon layers of spice. But this murgh tikka recipe from Chintan Pandya, the chef and a partner at Unapologetic Foods, a New York restaurant group that runs Masalawala & Sons, Dhamaka, Semma and Adda Indian Canteen, captures the essence of the dish with the convenience of an oven. Juicy chicken thighs are marinated twice: The first marinade is a quick 10-minute rest in salt, vinegar and ginger-garlic paste, while the second is a 3- to 4-hour dip in yogurt punctuated with deggi mirch (a vibrant red chile powder), garam masala and turmeric. Don’t expect the yogurt to mute the flavors: It adds a level of creaminess, but the spices dominate this dish. — Alexa Weibel
Cucumber and Chili Raita
Curried Summer Squash Soup With Yuba and Cilantro
Butter Chicken
Butter chicken is a great, ever-evolving, cross-continental dish found in Delhi, London, New York, Perth and most points in between. In its purest form, it is yogurt-and-spice-marinated chicken dressed in a velvety red bath comprising butter, onions, ginger and tomatoes scented with garam masala, cumin and turmeric, with a cinnamon tang. This version was adapted from Amandeep Sharma, a young kitchen hand at the restaurant Attica, in Melbourne, Australia, who used to make it for staff meal. It is wildly luxurious. Serve with basmati rice and mango chutney, with papadums or naan if you can find them, with extra rice if you cannot.
Tandoori Steak
Tandoori Mushrooms
Cucumber Raita
Serve this raita as a refreshing side dish with grains or with any curry. Or enjoy it on its own for lunch.
Tomato Salad on Cumin-Spiced Yogurt
This simple tomato salad is ready in minutes, and works best with a mix of ripe tomatoes from the market that are delicious enough to eat raw. Layered on cumin-spiced yogurt, and slathered in a bright herb dressing, it’s hearty enough to have as a late summer meal with a piece of grilled bread. The recipe comes from chef Preeti Mistry, who ran a restaurant in Oakland called Juhu Beach Club, inspired by her unique experience as an Indian-American born in London to Asian parents from East Africa, raised in the American Midwest, who was cheffing in northern California.
Green-Tomato Chutney
Sabut Raan (Roast Leg of Lamb)
This recipe for a whole roasted leg of lamb comes from the cookbook author Sameen Rushdie, who wrote "Indian Cookery," the classic published in Great Britain in 1988. On Sundays, after a matinee at the Metro Cub Club in Bombay, the Rushdie family often sat down to a special lunch of roast lamb. In this version, the yogurt marinade turns into a rich sauce as it mixes with the braising liquid in the oven. Ms. Rushdie still turns to the dish as the centerpiece of a dinner party, because it can be set up ahead of time and cooked in the oven. The leg is trimmed of all fat, so it’s important to keep it moist: For the first couple of hours of cooking, keep it covered, with some water in the pan, then uncover and let the surface brown a little at the end.
Curried Cauliflower, Potatoes and Peas
Spicy-Sour Potatoes With Cumin
Mustard Peas (Rai Walli Mattar)
Grilled Skirt Steak With Smoky Eggplant Chutney
This crusty, succulent steak is flavored with a powerful mixture of coriander, cumin, mustard seed, chile powder and cinnamon. Take care not to overcook the meat; rare to medium rare guarantees tender beef. For even more flavor, serve the steak with a smoky eggplant chutney, which comes together quickly.
Mustard-Ginger Chicken (Rai Adrak-Walli Murgh)
Green Lentil Dal (Hara Masoor Ki Dal)
Coconut Shrimp Curry With Mushrooms
This simple curry, infused with spices, has a pleasant flavor with a hint of coconut. Use whatever kind of cultivated mushrooms you can find, from button-type white ones to golden oyster mushrooms. Feel free, too, to skip the curry leaves, but if you can find them, they add a nice depth of flavor.
Pan-Roasted Spiced Cauliflower With Peas
This dish is inspired by a trip to Curry Hill, a neighborhood in New York dotted with stores selling saris, Indian restaurants, Pakistani cafes and hole-in-the-wall spice shops. When I got home from my shopping spree, a cauliflower was screaming for Indian spices, garlic and ginger. Better still, I knew I could knock together a pan-roasted meal in about 20 minutes.
Spiced Mango Chutney With Chiles
Chutneys are often made with unripe or dried fruit; they can include vinegar, sugar and spices. This recipe, with ripe fruit, offers a two-toned flavor: sweet and tropical offset by sultry spices and the heat of chilies. It’s welcome in a grilled-cheese sandwich, stirred into mayonnaise or yogurt for a quick dip or spread, or alongside any curry or daal. There are thousands of varieties of mangoes, but two are predominant. The Tommy Atkin is green, blushed with rose, and as large as a softball. The champagne mango, the size of a large peach, is pale gold, with a floral flavor. I prefer the champagne, which tends to be less fibrous and has an impossibly lovely scent, but any mango is a boon. The fruit is full of such promise.
