INDIA, NICE AND SLOW
WHEN YOU THINK ABOUT INDIA’S VAST LAND AREA AND ITS HUGE POPULATION, you stop and wonder how she can feed her billion-plus people. And she does feed her people – well. Slow Food is definitely practiced in India even if they don’t preach it. If my short st
For breakfast I went on a culinary adventure and avoided everything Western, just for a few days.
I was happy to be coached by no less than the sous chef of the Taj Palace hotel. Chef Oberoi went out of his way to guide me through the different breads, chutneys and sauces.
One will be amazed at the different ways Indians have cooked or baked or fried bread from flour – rice, wheat, chickpea – name it and they’ve probably already thought about it.
The sauces were amazing. I tried sambhar which is like an all-around soupy dipping sauce for dosa, idli and puri breads.
I had street food in the comfort of the five-star Taj –
samosa and a fried chickpea one like a falafel drizzled with tamarind sauce and coriander sauce.
I tried poha, a flattened rice grain dish, a vermicelli noodle called semiya upma and even their famous hakka egg noodles which also figured in our buffet lunches (usually the vegetarian choice).
The pratha, roti and dosa station could make breads and pancakes from different persuasions – some from the Northern states and some from the south.
My only break from the savory Indian spread was having familiar fresh fruits – “Indian” mango, papaya and pineapple. And a sweet lime they call mosambi, which tastes like our dalandan.
At the dinner hosted by the officials we had a copper plate filled with little bowls of okra, vegetables, potatoes,
dahl makhani (lentils cooked in lovely savory ghee), yogurt and a center bowl with vegetable
biryani. There was a rogan josh lamb dish which I skipped as I chose the vegetarian plate.
The dessert was interesting – a cheese and reduced milk dessert that tasted like pastillas de leche; a sinful indulgent fried dough dipped in syrup and also gulab jamun, our favorite syrupy sweet balls.
Even as the setting was a bit formal, we were offered breads baked in a tandoori oven, hot and crisp and eaten with the hands, still the proper way even in formal dinners. The idea was to break some bread and pick up some savory morsels with it and allow the flavors to explode in your mouth. No other sauce was needed as each dish was expertly spiced to complement the neutral taste of the breads or long grain
basmati rice. The chutneys served to complement each dish. This must be Slow Food Indian style. Each dish was made with a lot of effort as the spices have to be balanced and not too overpowering. I admit it is an acquired taste, but I was loving it. I admired each speck of grain or pellet of spice that I found in the chutneys and the dishes. It is a diverse culture but nonetheless each Indian I spoke with was proud of his or her heritage. Though they can easily tell which comes from the North and which is southern, western or northeastern, they have the same pride in introducing each dish, no matter their own provenance.
“There is nothing mothers and fathers can do which oil can’t,” said a famous Indian blurb according to the F&B manager Mr. Sulik as we watched the chef put a fresh piece of dough into the hot oil from which came a perfectly puffed puri. Like magic it ballooned and stayed puffed until you eat it. “It’s wonderful isn’t it?” he asked. I nodded in agreement as I put yet another piece of bread onto my plate.
And to top my visit, the chef and his manager gifted me with a vegetarian cookbook from the Taj, a souvenir of my culinary journey to the land of Incredible India.
Elsewhere in the city, our friends brought us to an organic café called Altitude. We met the owner, Dharamendra Chhabra, an amiable man who left his hotel job to open this place. He has an organic farm, an organic market/grocery and just last year he started the café. Why Altitude? Because “everything good is grown at a certain altitude,” he says.
He personally went around the café and took the orders of the mixed clientele – expats, locals and tourists like us. The meals we chose were all organically grown and I had wondeful millet (same used for our budbud kabog) noodles with broccoli florets, mushroom, cherry tomatoes and fresh peanuts. Millet is a grain not often used in making pasta and this is gluten-free sobalike noodles.
Two doors away from the café is the Altitude Organic Market, a compact two-story storefront. I did see fresh almonds (the fruit before you see the familiar nut), cherry tomatoes (which I found in my pasta) and many fruits like pomegranate, mosambi (sweet lime), all coming from organic farms.
And in another famous store downtown called Khadi, opened in 1915 by no less than Mahatma Gandhi, we spotted natural food ingredients like ginger, curcumin and many different ayurvedic and homeopathy products. I got myself a detox powder recommended by a seatmate at dinner. It’s all natural and just mixed professionally by India’s naturalist practitioners.
I was amazed at how everything in India is done in tune with the seasons and everything is cooked or eaten to either cool or warm the body, naturally. Not everything is a hot spice. There are variations of mixes and the combination of nature’s gifts all contribute to India’s rich culinary heritage.