Indian Cooking made easy

Traditional Maharashtrian Thali-Image Courtesy-Hotel Shreyas-Pune.

Rajashthani Thali-Picture Courtsy--World Wide Web

In continuation to my previous post about the Spice Rack, I will go through some simple terms and what they mean in Indian Cooking.   

It is really helpful to basically understand the methods of cooking and your spices and follow the recipe to the T, to make a successful dish and get confident. Cooking is really an experiment in kitchen.some fail some succeed...

( Source for this wealth. Took help from the information on the link)

Bhuna -

Bhuna is a method of cooking Indian spices, particularly cooking in hot oil. This process is used to release and preserve the flavors of the spices while removing the raw feel of them. Its name literally means cooking in oil and used for cooking Indian food, especially curry.

Curry -
This is an Indian food that is made of various spices mixed and cooked together. Curry, which came from the Indian work kari, means vegetables soaked in spices and is therefore a good recipe to resemble the Indian spices. The traditional Indian curry is made up of fenugreek, turmeric, red pepper, black pepper, as well as cloves, coriander and other spices.

Tadka -
This is also a process of cooking spices which is similar to Bhuna. However, the difference is that Tadka is used for whole spices only.
** Notes form Ash
Ideally Tadka is heating little oil/ghee in a pan, adding mustard seeds, letting those crackle, then adding cumin seeds, curry leaves, green chili, and lastly adding turmeric and hing/Aesofodita. The reason you add turmeric and hing last is that it burns easily and turmeric will turn black and spoil the colour and the flavour it is needed to impart to the dish

Masala -
Masala is a term in India which means mixture of spices cooked in oil. Its most popular version is the Garam Masala which is used in preparing many Indian food recipes like curry. This mixture of spices is usually used as garnish for food.


Tandoori -
Tandoori is like a large oven made up of clay and heated with charcoal. It is used to cook various foods in spices including meat and chicken.

These are some of the things you need to know about Indian herbs and spices. Indian spices are not really hard to deal with and some are similar to what we use in our everyday life. It is just a matter of mixing and cooking them in a right way.

Hopefully, now you are not as intimidated with Indian cooking as you were before as now you know more than what you started out with, let the experiments begin..

Love Ash.