‘Tempering’ spices in oil key to Indian cuisine
Dishes from Southern India feature four main spices
Chitra Agrawal has two spice tiffins in her Brooklyn kitchen — one contains the main South Indian spices and the other North. The stainless steel boxes can’t be beat for storing spices, she says, particularly when employing a key concept in Indian cooking, tempering (a.k.a. tadka).
“You can save time by not having to open a bunch of bottles,” the chef and author explains. “Having a spice tiffin (masala dabba) comes in handy especially if you’re making Indian food because of the tempering of spices. A lot of times, you’re trying to get a number of different spices into the (hot) oil in pretty quick succession.”
Tempering — heating whole or ground spices in oil or ghee to pour over different dishes — “is at the heart of Indian cooking,” Agrawal writes in her debut cookbook, Vibrant India (Ten Speed Press, 2017). In fact, almost all of the savoury dishes in her collection of vegetarian recipes include the technique.
Agrawal devotes the book to her mother, Prathima, and her hometown of Bangalore, the capital of Karnataka in South India. Depending on the region, the spices used for tempering will vary, Agrawal explains.
In the South, it’s four spices: black mustard seeds, asafetida (a.k.a. hing; a pungent resin), curry leaves and red chili.
“Indian cooking is so diverse. There are so many different types of ingredients and spices. But to make it accessible, especially for a beginner, you have to start with the foundation. And that, for me, is the tempering of spices and these four spices,” she says.
Agrawal grew up with South and North Indian dishes on the table. Both of her parents cook, and while her mother hails from the South, her father is from the northern state of Uttar Pradesh.
Before she was born, her parents left India for the U.S., settling in New Jersey.
“I’m familiar with North and South Indian cooking but there’s cooking from West and East, Central India and other regions that are totally different as well. It’s infinite. Even within my family, I would have aunts sending me recipes that were completely different than my mom’s … You know that word ‘authentic’? … I have no idea what authentic means,” Agrawal says with a laugh.