Nuts used in Indian Cooking
Most of us are fortunate to have snacked on nuts like cashews, almonds, pistachios, peanuts either plain or toasted and know the taste and flavor. Their culinary usage does not bring vivid memories except, perhaps for peanut chutney. The diverse range of seeds also intrigues the conventional cooks and challenges their expertise to successfully incorporate them in their day to day cooking. It is not that the challenge is not there for the Chef but what comes to their aid is their continual exposure to variety of them including imported.
One might have come across kormas dishes and the one described as being in white gravy, which traces its root from Mughal kitchen, uses a blend of nuts and seeds paste and impart their own rich character to the finished dishes.
Some of the notable dishes where one may come across their application, even though they are becoming expensive with each passing day & also witness their less favored substitute, are kormas- both vegetarian and meat, chutneys like sesame and peanut, desserts mainly as garnish like slivered almond and pistachio.
Here we list some of the most famous nuts and seeds as follows:
Almond: While most of the original Lucknowi recipes which has been using almonds for centuries, they are being replaced by easily available and less costly cashew nut as India is a major processing centre of imported kernels. They are also used extensively for garnishing a variety of Indian dishes in slivered form.
Cashew nut: Grown extensively in South India (Kerala) and Goa, they hardly find their way into local cuisine. They come into three different varieties like broken, half and full.
Peanut: Grown in most part of India they are used extensively in west coast cuisine and in the most famous peanut chutney from South India. It is also the most famous time pass snacks, as it is called in common parlance, for common people travelling by train or bus.
White poppy seed: Primarily used a thickening agent in the form of a paste in Mughlai and Hyderabadi cuisine. Some of the people also make Halwa (Indian pudding). It comes from the same plant which produces opium but in no way used for their narcotic values as it loses most of its sedative properties when it ripens.
Mustard seeds: Mustard seeds as a paste are almost exclusively used in Bengali cuisine and seeds as a tempering are used in South India cuisine. Mustard and fish are natural companions and western cuisine are replete with recipes of the same but confined to just Sarson Maach and some other vegetable preparation in West Bengal.
Pista: known as pistachio in English, it is a popular snack item with drinks when salted in their own shell. They are also used as a garnish on Indian sweets like kheer (Indian milk pudding) and the most famous of all the pista Kulfi (Milk and pista ice cream) and pista burfi (Indian milk cake).
While the reading on nuts and seeds and their application are always very interesting particularly on the backdrop of their vast culinary usage, rest of the information will be carried on in the second blog of nuts and seeds.
Tags: bhatura, chana, curries, paneer, karahi, kebab, gosht, lentil, balti, roti
