On India's approach to vegetables
And a small favour to ask!
Something that I’ve been passionate about in recent years, especially in the aftermath of the 2019 Australian bushfires, is learning about how to make vegetables delicious.
We tend to think of vegetarianism or veganism as a recent trend, but a plant-forward approach to eating has been rooted in Asian cuisines and food cultures for centuries. Through the running of Singapore Noodles & the podcast for a year, I’ve invited guests on the show and written newsletters on this topic, and it seems like there are many of you who are keen to learn more too. I will be making a more concerted effort to share more vegetable-related content here on this newsletter, so that we can journey together!
This week on the podcast, I’ve invited Sowmiya Venkatesan who is a lifelong vegetarian and the founder of Kechil Kitchen. If you watch Masterchef Singapore, you’d also recognize her as one of the finalists of Season 1.
In our chat, she unpacks tempering, which is one of the key cooking techniques in Indian cuisine, where fat is used as a vehicle to bloom and carry the flavour of spices (different from the definition of tempering in the Western world, where it involves chocolate or eggs). Learning how to temper spices properly has made a world of a difference in my own vegetarian cooking, and I’ll be sharing more about this technique in the next newsletter.
Tomato Chutney
4 tablespoons ghee
1 stick cinnamon
4 cloves
1 star anise
4 cardamoms
10 cashew nuts
1 tablespoon raisins
200g onion, chopped
500g tomatoes, sliced thinly
Sugar and salt to taste
2 sprigs curry leaves
1 teaspoon mustard seeds
Heat the ghee and fry the spices for a minute. Add cashew nuts and fry till golden. Add raisins and fry until they plump up. Add onion and fry until they soften. Add the tomatoes, rock sugar and salt. Allow it to simmer in its own juices for 5 minutes. Transfer to a serving dish.
Heat 3 tablespoons of ghee. When hot, add mustard seeds and curry leaves. Once the seeds and leaves splutter, pour the contents of the pan over the chutney.