Indian Cuisine

Indian cooking isn't one cuisine — it's dozens of regional cuisines that differ from each other more than they resemble one another. The north cooks with ghee, wheat and dairy; the south with rice, coconut and sesame oil.

Tempering (tarka)

This is the most important technique in Indian cooking: whole spices — cumin, mustard, fenugreek — crackle in hot ghee or oil for a few seconds, and the mixture is poured over the finished dish. The heat releases the volatile oils, and the difference between a dish with tarka and one without is enormous.

The order of the spices

Whole spices go into the oil first, then onion, garlic and ginger, then ground spices in the last two minutes before any liquid. That order isn't a detail — ground spices burn in seconds if they go in early.

Biryani

Biryani is layers of parboiled rice and yoghurt-marinated meat, sealed under a lid of dough and finished on its own steam (dum). The result is rice that takes the aroma of the meat without turning claggy.

Kasuri methi

Dried fenugreek leaves rubbed between the palms before scattering — this is what gives butter chicken the note people try to reproduce without knowing where it comes from.