Spices

I grew up with eating a lot of poppy seeds and absolutely adore them. They somewhat make me feel snug and my grandmothers poppy seed cake is one of my most delicious childhood memories.

After marrying my Bengali husband I figured that Bengalis love their poppy seeds as well. They are used lavishly in Bengali cooking, but in a very different way to what I knew.

Posto is the Bengali word for poppy seeds and they are mostly ground to a creamy paste, which is often mixed with vegetables and eaten with rice. It’s fascinating how a familiar ingredient incarnates to something else in a different cultural background. I quickly fell in love with this posto. And my husband, on the other side, became a big fan of poppy seed cake. Yeah.

This recipe for poppy seed curry is loosely adapted from a dish our Bengali cook Budhan-da cooks. Traditionally posto is cooked with white poppy seeds, but it also tastes nice with the black variety. It’s best eaten together with some plain white rice, but we also like it over mashed potatoes.

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Spring Onion & Poppy Seed Curry

For 3 - 4 people.

Ingredients

• 60 gram poppy seeds (white or black)
• 2 medium potatoes
• 3 - 4 spring onions
• 1 tablespoon mustard oil 
• Salt to taste

Instructions

1. Add the poppy seeds and 100 ml water to a small blender and grind the seeds to a paste. Add a bit more water if it feels too dry.

Grinding the poppy seeds properly is the most important step in this recipe as poppy seeds only release their flavour when ground. The paste won’t be completely smooth, but don’t give up too early. You will understand it best by rubbing it between your fingers and tasting it. Once the seeds are broken down properly it will feel slightly creamy and the taste will change. Set the paste aside.

2. Peel the potatoes and cut into small wedges. Boil in salted water till almost soft.

3. Separate the white and green parts of the onion. Cut the white onions into wedges and the green part into 2 cm long pieces.

4. Heat the oil over medium high heat and add the white onion wedges. Fry for 3 - 4 minutes till they are soft and slightly brown. Add the potatoes and green onion pieces and fry till soft. Add a few tablespoons of water if necessary. Reduce heat too low.

5. Now add the poppy seeds paste to the pan. Clean the blender jar with another 100 ml water and also add this. Heat through and it is ready to eat. Make sure you don’t cook the poppy seeds too long, especially the black poppy seeds tend to get unpleasantly dry quickly.

These rustic corn flatbreads are best eaten with the saag/leafy greens from my previous post. In India they are called makki ki roti. They are also nice with other curries, salads, etc. But eat them fresh as they will become hard if kept too long.

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Rustic Corn Flatbreads

For 4 flatbreads

Ingredients

Dry ingredients

• 1/2 cup wheat flour
• 1/2 corn flour
• 1 teaspoon turmeric
• 1/2 teaspoon ajwain seeds (optional)

Wet ingredients

• 1 tablespoon oil & some ghee/oil for frying
• Little less than 1/2 cup water

Instructions

Mix the dry ingredients. Add the oil and the water (you might not need all water) and knead for about 4 Minutes into a soft dough. Let the dough rest for 10 minutes.

Divide the dough in equal portions and roll them into balls. Flatten a ball by hand and rollout into a 18 cm disc with a rolling pin.

Put a little bit of ghee or oil in a little bowl and keep aside.

Heat a pan over medium low heat and start frying the flatbread without any oil. Change sides from time to time. Once the flatbread starts to get brown spots smear a thin layer of ghee or oil evenly on both sides.

Keep warm in a towel or some tin foil. Eat soon.

Although me and Budhan-da do most of the cooking in our house, my husband is a great cook too. His speciality is cabbage. It maybe seems odd to have perfected such an ordinary vegetable, but I love cabbage and he is the king-of-cabbage, so that makes us a great team.

Some form of cabbage is nowadays grown almost everywhere and most cultures have one or the other typical cabbage dish. In West Bengal cabbage is often eaten as bandhakopir torkari, a lightly spiced dish, with a perfect balance of sweet & salty, rounded off with a dollop of ghee.

The ghee gives the cabbage a silken mouth feel and makes the umami rich vegetable even more savoury. It really is the ingredient which elevates it to another level.

Indian ghee shouldn’t be mistaken with plain clarified butter because it can have great depth of flavour, from nutty undertones to a cheesy funk. For making Indian ghee the butter is cooked till the milk solids caramelize and the funkiness comes from fermenting the milk/cream before churning the butter.  There are regional varieties too, my parents-in-law in West Bengal mostly use a brownish ghee, which gets cooked for hours and is so strongly caramelized and intense, that you only need a tiny amount to flavour a dish.

I grew up with the uniform taste of german butter and butterschmalz (clarified butter) and discovering that there are so many more flavours hidding in the humble milk fat still feels exciting.

This cabbage is one of the best dishes to explore the magic of ghee. The recipe is based on my husbands, although I didn’t manage sticking to it completely and used it as a filling for a galette. This is actually totally unnecessary, but on the other side works fantastically well, so why not?

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Ghee Cabbage Galette

Ingredients

For the pastry dough

• 160 grams all-purpose flour
• 1/4 teaspoon table salt
• 110 grams cold butter, cut into pieces
• 60 grams yogurt
• 10 ml lemon juice
• 60 ml ice water
• 1 egg for glazing

For the cabagge

• 750 gram white cabagge, finely sliced
• 1 tablespoon oil (I use mustard oil)
• 1 piece cinammon bark (cassia)
• 1 teaspoon cumin seeds
• 3 cardamom pods, seeds only
• 1 tablespoon ginger paste (or grated ginger)
• 1 tomato, grated
• 1 teaspoon turmeric powder
• 1 teaspoon garam masala
• 1 teaspoon salt (per taste)
• 1 teaspoon sugar (per taste)
• 1 tablespoon ghee

You will also need a pan with a lid

Instructions

Start with preparing the pastry dough. Mix the flour with salt in one bowl and the yogurt, lemon juice and water in another bowl. Sprinkle the butter pieces over the flour and rub them in with your fingers till you have a coarse, crumbly mixture. Take care to not overwork the dough, there should still be some bigger, pea size butter pieces. With a spoon mix in the water/yogurt mixture till a large lump forms. Wrap in plastic and rest in the fridge for an hour.

Prepare the cabbage. Heat the oil over medium heat and once it’s hot add the cinnamon, cumin and cardamon seeds (in this order). Fry the spices till they release their essential oil and smell nicely. Add the ginger and grated tomato and fry till the raw smell disappears. Add the turmeric powder and finely cut cabbage. Stir and fry for a minute or so till everything is nicely mixed up. Reduce the heat to low, cover the pan with the lid and let the cabbage steam in its own juices till it’s soft (ca. 10 min). Once the cabbage is done season with garam masala, salt and sugar. At last add the ghee and stir it through.

Let it cool down. Once it’s cool, separate the egg and mix the egg white into the cabbage. Mix the egg yolk with a bit of water and keep aside for glazing the galette later.

Assemble the galette. Heat the oven to 180 degrees. Flour your working surface and roll the dough into a 30 cm round. Transfer it to a parchment lined baking sheet. Distribute the cabbage in the middle of the dough, leaving a 5 cm edge. Fold over the edge, pleating where it’s necessary to make it fit. Glaze with the egg yolk.

Bake for 30 - 40 minutes till golden brown. If the cabbage turns too dark, cover it with a piece of tinfoil. Take out of the oven, let it cool a few minutes and cut into wedges. It also tastes nice cold.

Tomatoes are everywhere on my social media feed at the moment and people praise their heavenly, late summer aroma. I have to admit though that I rarely have eaten really good, flavourful tomatoes. The german standard tomato simply isn’t as good as it’s Italian or Spanish relatives. Also tomatoes in India are only average and not even our homegrown tomatoes are anywhere near to what I ate on holidays in Italy.

But I actually don’t mind, as even the standard tomato has a lot to offer. One of the reasons why tomatoes are such popular fruits is probably because they are natural umami providers as they contain high levels of glutamic acid. Indian cooking embraces this quality and many dishes contain tomatoes in their base gravy, where they provide acidity, volume and savouriness without the taste of tomato.

My recipe for tomato sauce takes a similar approach. With a very unique technique it magically transforms average tomatoes into an unbelievable hearty sauce which reminds me almost of eating goulash (which I think is a very desirable result).

It tastes fantastic with noodles but can also be used as a base for other dishes. The cinnamon might seem a bit out of place, but it  is a really good flavour combination which my grandmother taught me many years ago. In India cinnamon is actually only used in salty dishes..

You’ll need a big heavy bottomed pan or pot for this recipe. I use a cast iron pan with 28 cm diameter and high edges.

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Smoky Cinnamon Tomato Sauce

For 2 - 3 people.

Ingredients

• 9 - 10 tomatoes
• 2 tablespoons ghee or oil
• 1 onion
• 1 cup red wine
• salt, per taste
• 1 teaspoon sugar
• 1,5 teaspoons ground cinnamon

Instructions

Cut the tomatoes into half and the onion into rough pieces. Heat the ghee/oil in the pan on medium high heat. Once it’s nicely hot lay the tomatoes in the pan with the cut side down.

Best to do that with a cooking spoon or something similar as the oil will splutter. Only add as many tomato halves as there is space, they should not lay to tight or overlap. In my pan fit ca. 9 tomatoes/18 halves.

Wait till the tomatoes have nicely browned with a few black spots. Don’t stir or move them around as this will release water and stop them from browning. Depending on your pan and heat source it will take around 5 - 10 Minutes. Half way through add the onion pieces and brown them as well.

Deglaze the tomatoes with the cup of wine and add another 1-2 cups of water. Reduce the heat and simmer the tomatoes for around 10 minutes. Add sugar, salt and cinnamon and roughly puree the sauce in a blender or with a handheld mixer.

I love pumpkin and as it’s a typical summer vegetable in India, we eat all kind of pumpkin dishes already since months. From an Ayurvedic point of view pumpkin belongs to the vegetables which cool the body and are an ideal food for summer. To cool down further in the Indian heat we often keep the stove off and I prepare the pumpkin raw as a salad.

To eat pumpkin raw as a salad is not so well known, but actually most pumpkins can be eaten raw and they have a wonderful mild, nutty flavour and are pleasantly crunchy. Some decorative pumpkins can’t be eaten raw, but you can use any common pumpkin or squash which is meant for eating. Raw pumpkin salad tastes best with a sweetish, creamy dressing and for my salad I borrowed the flavours from an Indian chaat. These are fantastic, north Indian snacks, which can come in wide variety of ingredients. They all are a wild combination of flavours and textures and taste salty, sweet, sour, crunchy and creamy, all at the same time.

Most chaats use some deep-fried item as the base, but the flavours also tastes great with crunchy pumpkin. The salad is done really fast and it’s the perfect healthy snack, which fills you up without being heavy.

Only the tamarind date chutney takes a little time. But once ready it’ll last for months in the fridge and also makes for a fantastic dip, ketchup replacement and can be used in many more recipes. Tamarind is a very versatile ingredient and injects a deep sour-savoury flavour in many dishes (Ottolenghi called it once one of his secret weapons). It’s really, really worth buying! I’ll be posting some more tamarind recipes in future to show you what it can do.

You’ll get tamarind paste in any Asian market or online and it’ll also last for ages and can be used for many more Indian/Asian/Freestyle dishes.

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Raw Pumpkin Salad with Tamarind Date Chutney

Enough as a snack for 2 people. The recipe for the tamarind chutney will yield one big jar and last for up to 3 months in the fridge.

Ingredients

Tamarind Date Chutney

• 200 gram dates without stones, cut in small pieces
• 5 tablespoons tamarind paste or 100 gram dried tamarind
• 1/2 teaspoon cumin seeds
• 1 teaspoons salt
• 1/4 TL teaspoon chili powder (optional)
• 500 ml water

Salad

• 1/4 of a medium sized pumpkin (hokkaido, muscat, etc)
• 1 teaspoon lemon juice
• one handfull fresh coriander leaves
• one handfull boiled chickpeas
• one handfull roasted peanuts (salted or unsalted)
• 1 green chili, finely chopped (optional)
• 250 gram yogurt
• 1/2 teaspoon salt
• 2 tablespoons tamarind chutney

Instructions

Chutney

If you use the dried tamarind you first have to make your own tamarind paste. Pour 1 big cup of boiling hot water of the dried tamarind and let it soak for 30 min. You can stir it from time to time to loosen it up a bit. After 30 min add the tamarind and water to a sieve and by pressing on it try to extract as much pulp as possible.

Quickly dry roast the cumin seeds in pot over medium heat till they change colour and smell aromatic. Then add 500 ml water and chopped dates. Bring it to a boil and let it simmer for about 5 minutes. The dates should dissolve in the water, depending on how dry your dates were when you started, it’ll might take a little bit longer. Pour the dates and water into a blender (or use a handheld blender) and puree it, strain through a sieve. Add the puree back to the pot.

Now add the salt, chili powder and tamarind paste (or the extracted pulp), bring to a boil and simmer till it has a thick pouring consistency (a bit thinner than ketchup). Fill in a sterilized glass jar.

As tamarind pastes vary in sourness you should taste the chutney. If it feels too sour add some brown sugar to it, till you feel it tastes balanced.

Salad

Peel and deseed the pumpkin, then grate it as rough as possible. I use a mandoline for it, but if a box grate is all you have you can use that too (it won’t be as crunchy though). Mix the grated pumkin with the lemon juice and green chili (if using), distribute on 2 plates and scatter the chickpeas, peanuts and coriander leaves over it.

Stir the salt into the yogurt, if the yogurt is very thick you can thin it out with a teaspoon full of water. Spoon the yogurt over the pumkin salad and top each plate with a generous tablespoon of tamrind chutney.

Notes

You can also add other ingredients to the salad. A handful of pomegranate seeds or some cubed potatoes or cucumber taste nice. If you are brave enough you can also crush some potato chips and add them on top.