Indian Recipes
351 recipes found
Gajak (Peanut-Sesame Brittle)
This recipe for gajak — an Indian treat that’s like a cross between peanut brittle and sesame candy, but with more nuanced flavor — comes from the North Carolina chef Cheetie Kumar, who always had it at Diwali and loves the way the flavors magically coalesce after the mixture sets for 45 minutes. Peanuts and sesame are found together in sweet recipes all through Northern India, and even appear as co-stars in savory dishes in the states of Gujarat and Maharashtra in chutneys and stuffed in eggplant. Jaggery adds some savory undertones that you can't get from regular sugar. You can find it online, at Indian grocery stores or some larger Asian supermarkets (look for blocks or balls, rather than granulated jaggery). It’s crucial to have your ingredients ready before starting; the gajak comes together fairly quickly but the sugar can burn if you don't watch it carefully. Cutting the brittle when it’s warm will yield pretty, uniform pieces, but it can also be broken once it has hardened into uneven, rustic chunks.
Classic Masala Dosa
A properly made crisp and savory Indian dosa is wonderfully delicious, and fairly simple to make at home, with this caveat: the batter must be fermented overnight for the correct texture and requisite sour flavor. However, once the batter is ready, it can be refrigerated and kept for several days, even a week. With a traditional spicy potato filling, dosas makes a perfect vegetarian breakfast or lunch. Serve them with your favorite chutney.
Grilled Halibut With Indian Spices and Corn Relish
Here, a fragrant combination of ground cumin, turmeric, coriander and fennel seed is rubbed all over fresh halibut steaks (Pacific salmon, wild striped bass and hake also work well here). The steaks are then left to marinate for a few hours in the refrigerator before grilling. The cooked fish is topped with a quick relish made of fresh corn, ginger, onion, cilantro and a bit of the spice mixture that's been sautéed in clarified butter. It's an unexpected yet extraordinary way to prepare fish that might just win over the self-proclaimed seafood-haters at the table.
Lentils, Potatoes and Peas in Indian-Style Tomato Sauce
Masoor Dal
Meera Sodha’s Chicken Curry
This simple curry serves as a fine introduction to the Indian home cooking of Meera Sodha, a British cookbook author whose “Made in India: Recipes From an Indian Family Kitchen” was released in 2015. The recipe for this curry, her "ultimate comfort food,'' derives from the one her Indian-born mother cooked for Sodha when she was growing up in Lincolnshire and for which she pined for during her college years in London. It provides a thick, gingery, garlic-flecked tomato sauce with deep notes of cinnamon and cumin, and a low flame of chile heat, surrounding small chunks of skinless chicken thigh, with slivered almonds scattered over the top at the end.
Smoky Eggplant Chutney
Mughlai Paratha
Mughlai paratha is a popular street food found in Bangladesh that traces back to the Mughal Empire. It’s a crisp, flaky, pan-fried flatbread that’s stuffed with fluffy eggs and fiery chiles, and gently spiced with earthy turmeric. Paratha is extremely customizable, so you can use what you have; this version is vegetarian, but keema, a spiced ground meat mixture, is often added. Vegetables like diced bell pepper or a handful of baby spinach are untraditional and welcome, but be mindful of the water content of the vegetables you choose or the eggs will weep. The end result is satisfyingly savory and addictive in its contrasting textures.
Tamarind Shrimp With Coconut Milk
Raghavan Iyer has dedicated his life to helping people learn to cook Indian food. He dissects the four main culinary regions of the country into manageable bites, and develops recipes that are simple to make but have complex flavors. In this recipe for puli jingha, he marries shrimp and coconut milk spiked with sambhar masala, a spice blend common in southern Indian kitchens. Nearly every household has its own version, and you can make the one he grew up with quite easily. Serve this curry over lime-scented rice or yellow split peas.
Aloo Kofta (Fried Potato Balls)
Surnoli (Coconut-Rice Pancakes)
Surnoli are soft, round and puffy pancakes, about the size of a diner’s silver dollars, and they can be served like them too, as a warm stack with a piece of melting butter on top. But surnoli batter contains no egg and no flour, and it isn't flipped at all but left to cook through on one side. Made from puréed raw and cooked rice, as well as coconut, and fermented with yogurt overnight, the konkani pancake becomes airy and takes on a gentle tang. Have it plain with a drizzle of ghee, or even a little honey. And if you want to try them savory, open a jar of your favorite Indian pickles instead. If you want to skip the longer fermentation, you could add a half teaspoon of Eno — an antacid made from sodium bicarbonate and citric acid, commonly used to fizz batters in Indian kitchens — just before you're ready to start cooking.
Split Green Mung Beans, Mumbai-Style
Mussels In White Wine With Curry
Khatti Dal, Hyderabad-Style
Julie Sahni is an architect by training, but while teaching Indian cooking on the side, she was “discovered” in 1974 and written about in The Times by Florence Fabricant. She has since become a well-known author of Indian cookbooks. In 2012, she taught Mark Bittman how to make several different kinds of dal, including this one. Carefully follow instructions for the tadka — heated ghee or oil and spices. It is the finishing touch, unparalleled in its brilliance and simplicity, and pairing the correct tadka with its designated dal is if not critical then at least desirable. To make it, you take ghee or oil and heat it with seeds, spices and, usually, some kind of onions, often to a degree that other cuisines might consider “overcooked.” The tadka is poured into the dal just before serving, and the whole thing explodes with fragrance and flavor.
Chicken Tikka Masala
This creamy, spiced curry made with tomato and hunks of chicken is a longtime favorite of Indian food lovers. This version is streamlined a bit, making it not-quite-authentic, but truly accessible to anyone with a well-stocked pantry. It's also adapted for those without a grill, so the yogurt-marinated chicken spends a few minutes under the broiler to replicate the blackened, smoky bits. Finally, chicken breasts or thighs work equally well here.
Quick Mango Kulfi
Traditional kulfi is made by boiling milk to reduce it, and to concentrate the milk solids, then freezing the base with flavorings such as fruit pulp, spices or nuts. Though kulfi is often compared to ice cream, it's nothing like it: Kulfi isn't churned. The protein and sugar create a rich, dense texture that is slightly crystalline and quick to melt. This recipe for instant mango kulfi takes short cuts, using canned sweetened condensed milk and heavy cream. It's a recipe that has no fixed season, that takes no time to mix up and that comes straight from my mother. She made it all year long when I was growing up, to hold us over in the lonely gaps between trips to see family in India. It's inauthentic — and delicious.
Cyrus's Express Bread-And-Butter Pudding
South Indian Cabbage With Yogurt
This spicy curry is inspired by a recipe by the cookbook author Madhur Jaffrey. I’ve seen other vegetarian recipes for cabbage cooked with dal (which I’ve made optional here, so you don’t have to go to a special Indian market), spices and coconut, but this one is the only one I’ve seen that’s enriched at the end with warmed yogurt. Make sure that you don’t let the yogurt get too hot or it will curdle. For a vegan dish, omit the yogurt.
Minty Yogurt Chutney
Sometimes Indian cooks use yogurt to make a cooling, barely-spicy raita sauce to accompany a meal. But for snacking, and to give a lift to anything that dips into it, you can also make yogurt into a fiery chutney.
Date-Stuffed Parathas With Yogurt Dip
This recipe plays fast and loose with the buttery, layered Indian flatbreads called parathas. Traditionally, a flour-and-water yeastless dough is brushed with clarified butter or oil, then folded over onto itself so that the breads puff in the pan when fried. If you’ve ever seen them stuffed, it’s generally with something savory — potatoes, onions or ground meat and the like, which give them heft and depth. In this version, sugary sliced dates are folded into the layers, then the breads are grilled rather than fried. (But they can be fried if you prefer.) They are sweeter and smokier than the usual parathas, but just as good for scooping up dips of all kinds. Here, they’re paired with a variation on raita, an Indian yogurt, cucumber and mint mixture that’s been garnished with crushed walnuts for crunch.
Pineapple Curry
Chicken Braised With White Poppy Seeds, Coconut Milk And Tomatoes
Cranberry-Pistachio Chutney With Figs
