I go there quite a lot, and this is not my experience at all, i have awesome food there. A wise old sage told me many years ago to only eat vegetarian there, as bad meat can make you very ill, while bad veggies just give you the craps. I continue to eat both, and only get bad guts as often as i do when pigging out on kebabs in London or the States.
I don’t think that’s anything to do with cuisine, but rather the vast difference in standard of living between where we live and most of India. Same is true of Mexico and many other places. Their limited resources likely going into obtaining something edible, rather than selecting from the highest quality options available and paying for refrigerated storage.
Ofc we also have highly regulated industries of food production, transportation, and consumption, where licensing a restaurant typically involves meeting numerous requirements on safety and cleanliness. But that doesn’t come cheap.
I will also say that, while I’m not vegetarian, India does have a pretty well-developed vegetarian cuisine. I recall a friend who is vegetarian once commenting that most restaurants have pretty constrained options for vegetarians, unless one is going to specifically a vegetarian place – a pretty high percentage of menu choices aren’t normally vegetarian. However, a lot of Indian places do have a pretty substantial number of options for folks in that situation, and those options aren’t, well, disappointingly second-class options.
Thai/vietnamese is also good, at least the places I go, you generally have a choice of what you want to add, could be chicken, tofu, or veggies for example.
I've had really bad luck lately with finding good Indian food. The last few times I tried the food was alright, but not particularly flavorful. I like spicy and even asked for the dishes spicy, and they were still fairly bland.
Fortunately I moved recently so I'm hopeful I can find a good place now.
It’s actually pretty easy to make most Indian dishes at home. I’d recommend checking out Hebbar’s Kitchen on YouTube - my Indian mate swears their recipes are authentic - and best of all, no annoying intros/voiceovers/like-and-subscribe nonsense etc.
Thanks for the recommendation! Been meaning to get into indian to introduce vegan options into my dinner recipes. The hardest step for me is collecting the spices and figuring out how they work with each other.
Otherwise once you have the right spice mix you can just add it to a thickener / bulkening ingredient and you are good to go.
If there’s an Indian/Asian store where you live, they should generally have everything you’d need. The spices are generally divided in to whole spices and ground spices.
For whole spices, commonly used ones are bay leaves, cardamom, cinnamon, cloves, star anise, saffron, mace, and peppers (dried red chillies and black peppercorns).
For ground spices, most common ones are turmeric, chilli powder, coriander powder, cumin powder, asafoetida powder, garam masala and curry powder.
There are also some key seeds and lentils, such as mustard seeds, coriander seeds, cumin seeds, fennel seeds, urad dal
Finally, there are fresh ingredients like curry leaves and coriander leaves, and of course, the usual ones such as ginger/garlic/onions/tomatoes, which you should already have in your pantry/fridge.
With the above in your pantry, you can cook a vast majority of the dishes, at least, as far as spices are concerned.
As for figuring out how they work together, if you follow a few recipes you’ll notice common patterns, so once you’ve got a few dishes under you belt you’d start to recognize which ones you’d need. Easiest way to figure out how they work is to repeat a dish you’ve made and exclude a particular spice, or say doubling the quantity of a particular spice so that it dominates. With so many permutations and combinations possible, you could prepare a dish differently each time and keep things interesting, it’s so much fun playing around with this stuff!
I run into this problem a lot, and I think it’s because I’m white lol. I’m sure they get bitched out by Karens often. My solution has been to have my bestie, who is not white, tell the waiter that I want it very spicy. They usually trust her haha
Add comment