Ingredients of Indian Cooking #3 – Onions

One of the most important and common ingredients of Indian cuisine is Onion.

Most of the vegetarian and non-vegetarian Indian dishes are cooked with onions. They are used extensively to enhance taste of vegetables / meat / poultry, render bulk to the gravy, to make some of the most delicious soups and chutneys, as well as consumed even raw in Indian salads.

You’d rarely see Indian recipes that do not contain Onions. But what are the factors that make onions a healthy addition to Indian cuisine? This post is dedicated to exploring this aspect.

Botanical Roots

Onion is also known as bulb onion, garden onion and just onion. Botanically, Onion – Allium Cepa – belongs to a large varied family which includes more than 500 species. It’s available in various forms, such as – fresh, frozen, canned, pickled, chopped plus a few more, and used for both culinary and non-culinary purposes.

Onions are an exceptional resource of natural vitamins like B6 and C, chromium, biotin, and fibers. As such the health benefits of onions are vast. Ranging from normal cough & cold to diseases of heart, diabetes, bacterial infections, breathing problems, asthma, bronchitis, etc. onions have proved to be real effective even for poor appetite.

Thus not only for culinary purposes (as vegetable ingredient), Onions are also used for adding medicinal value to food, because of their rich content of sulfides, sulfoxides and other sulphur composites. Studies have proven that together with garlic, onions help to keep up blood levels, avert blood clot formation, lower levels of pressure & sugar in blood, and cure many other diseases.

Types and methods

Onions are found in varied colors, red, yellow, white, and green, each possessing their individual distinctive essence, from very strong to slightly sweet. They are eaten in various ways – raw, cooked, fried or roasted – each has its own different taste and effect on your health. Other than the common bulb onions, spring onions are also used in cooking purposes. Spring onions are green and add a different taste and color to your recipes.

In case of Red Onions, the smaller it’s cut, the more widespread is the variation of the sulfur substances. The more powerful the odor of Onion and its impact on your eyes, the more healthy it is, since it’s believed to contain more vitamins and minerals. So while cutting onions, if it makes you cry with the pungent odour, it will make you healthier.

There are many ways you can cut onions, depending on the dish you’re cooking. When cut in larger blocks, it stores the vitamin and mineral capacity to the maximum while cooking. On the other hand if you finely chop it and keep in room temperature for sometime before cooking, it makes the onion turn golden brown quickly and reduces your cooking time.

Spring onions on the other hand add a very mild taste to the food. It is used raw and preferred fried compared to the red onions. Noodles, sandwiches, soups and curries are cooked using spring onions.

Treating onions in different ways while cooking, implants a specific flavor and releases a specific aroma. For example, proper Sautéing of the onions is very important as it can add a different dimension to your favorite dish. Sautéing for 5-7 minutes is considered apt for cooking most Indian dishes. Light golden brown should be the only color after you are done with sautéing the onions. If the color turns dark brown it will leave you with a bitter taste and the recipe could get spoilt totally.

So the next time you feel like crying when cutting onions for your favorite dish, do remember that you’re crying in favor of health and taste!

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5 Ways to Retain Taste Flavor and Aroma

Cooking is considered by many chefs and gourmets as a creative art! Retaining the perfect aroma in recipes, while enhancing flavor and taste, differentiates a finer chef from the rest. It may sound easy, but a majority of the aspiring chefs take a long time to understand this, while many others fail to make sustained efforts to capture this finer nuance of cooking.

Thankfully, the traditional cooking methods practiced by our mothers and grannies, are good enough to start on this journey of mastering this fine art of great cooking. For example, I learned from my mother that one of the most important aspects of keeping the flavor (as well as essential nutrients), is to master the art of covered cooking.

The 5 great ways to retain flavor, aroma and taste in cooking are: Slow Cooking, Covered Cooking, Sautéing, Deep frying and Half-Boiling.

Low Flame cooking

Covered Cooking

Slow cooking – Cooking vegetables and meat in low flame retains their maximum benefits and better taste. It’s true that it takes more time to cook the food, but it always enriches the aroma, taste and flavor of the recipe. It allows you to use the ingredients in measured quantities, in time, which produces the best results by augmenting the richer taste in your cooked food. When you cook on a low flame, the food doesn’t get burnt and doesn’t necessitate nurturing much.

Covered Cooking – Covered cooking retains moisture in your primary ingredients, which in turn retains the original taste and flavor. While cooking, when you cover the pan, it also uses lesser oil and retains softness, so that the items are juiciest to relish. This method also adds a better dimension to your cooking.

The best part of slow and covered cooking is that when the food is getting cooked you can engage yourself in some other work and let your food cook gently without tending.

Sauteing

Sautéing is another cooking method, in which very less amount of oil is used to cook – although at relatively high temperatures. This method allows the food to cook very quickly in the sauté pan. Sautéing yields best result when clarified butter is used instead of regular cooking oil. The clarified butter is usually kept at room temperatures for about 30 minutes before the process of sautéing. This type of sautéing allows the food to retain flavor and aroma, while adding a unique taste of clarified butter.

Sautéing can also be done with little or no oil, which is very healthy especially when you need to keep your calorie counts to minimum. When doing “no-oil sautéing” the best practice is to use low-medium stock, broth or even soya-sauce on a flatter frying pan. The vegetables also need to be sliced in smaller sizes and kept in room temperature for sometime before cooking; this practice allows the chopped vegetables turn golden brown quickly too.

Sautéing requires a larger space to cook, so always make sure of using a large pan for sautéing. When the pan gets hot allow the butter solid to take its liquid form in the pan before starting the sautéing process.

Deep Frying

Deep frying is a faster cooking method where you submerge the food in hot oil. You won’t require water to cook your food when you are using this cooking practice. If executed properly in an optimum flame, deep-frying doesn’t make your food extremely fatty, since the moisture in the food deters the oil. It’s however important to know how fast you should keep the food in oil before you take it out. Let your hands do the talking with this method, especially while cooking your favorite crispies at home.

Half-Boiling

Deep frying gives a different and richer aroma, flavor and taste to the items cooked. Many of the Indian cuisine have their signature rich taste and aroma, thanks to waterless and deep-frying.

Half-Boiling is another faster way of cooking, which retains the original flavor and taste of vegetables. This process of cooking also retains the nutritional value to the maximum! To get the best nutritional value and flavor out of half-boiled cooking, the vegetables need to be cut in bigger slices – or better still, “knifeless slicing” or hand-broken into pieces, as practiced traditionally. Larger sizes also retain the vitamin content.

So these are the 5 distinct ways to get retain flavor aroma and taste in cooking at home. With the ever-increasing rise in various diseases especially diabetes and high cholesterol the food doesn’t need to be tasteless at all!

Watch this space for more such ideas in the future.

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Ingredients of Indian Cooking #1 – Mustard

The ingredients used in Indian cooking are as exotic as the cooked recipes themselves! In fact, our ancestors made sure that the ingredients for their food are carefully chosen, to meet the daily nutrient requirements for your body, make sure that the primary vegetable, poultry or the fish is well cooked to remove offensive smells and toxins, as well as make sure that a unique taste is created every time, which stays forever.

For example, any fish recipe could be cooked using any cooking oil – sunflower oil, corn oil, soya-bean oil, rice-bran oil, refined oils, etc.. However, when Mustard oil is used for cooking a certain number of fishes, the taste-meter goes north and nutrition value best maintained.

Mustard Seeds (image-source:http://tradeindia.com)

Mustard is the base of many vegetarian and non-vegetarian cooking in India. The rich smell gives you a better sense to cook, adding new breadth to your recipes. It is so much loaded with essential vitamins and nutrients, so that the oil from Mustard seeds is often the recommended massage oil for growing babies and adults in India. It improves blood circulation of your body, helps in hair vitalizing, acts as an appetizer, improves skin texture, is anti-bacterial in nature and loads of other goodies are ingrained in it.

Mustard Oil (image-source: http://www.alibaba.com)

Mustard oil has a strong sinus-irritating aroma – somewhat like that of wasabi – a hot nutty taste and is regularly used for cooking in Eastern & Northern India. The oil is always pre-heated before cooking which is trying to cut its strong taste and stink.

According to a survey by American Heart Association, Mustard Oil is better than Olive Oil from the health point of view. Mustard oil is considered to have low saturated fat as compared to other vegetable oils, e.g. sunflower oil, palmolein oil and other cooking oils. This pungent tasting oil consists of fatty acid, oleic acid, erucic acid and linoleic acid.

Mustard Oil has the goodness to improve your Heart function, keep triglycerides under control, improve blood fluidity, and helps the patients of Crohn’s disease, asthma, arthritis, cramps, adult diabetes. It has antioxidant and cholesterol reducing properties which is one of the most important reasons for its extensive use in Northern & Eastern India.

Therefore the next time you feel like cooking a vegetable or meat, consider cooking it in Mustard Oil, and you’d find your recipe taste like never before! For a recipe prepared in Mustard Oil, please look through my next post.

References:

1. Benefits of Mustard Oil
2. Mustard Oil is best for your Health
3. The Hindu – Mustard Oil best for your Heart
4. Why Mustard Oil beats Sunflower, Safflower, soybean and other oils
5. American Chefs Discover Mustard Oil
6. Mustard is about to get its moment
7. So You Think You Like Grated Wasabi on Your Sushi?