Pressure Cookers: A desi secret

I own and use an Indian stainless steel Hawkins brand pressure cooker (pictured above...though that isn't the one in my kitchen). The gori wife life comes with a learning curve. Since learning to cook desi, there are so many amazing foods, ingredients, and cooking tools that I have come to use quite regularly but had no clue about before. Pressure cookers aren't completely unheard of in the average American kitchen, but they are definately uncommon. However, the pressure cooker is an extremely common cooking vessel in the desi kitchen. Not all desis use them, for various reasons; "all the taste goes," "not traditional way to make X," or "pressure cookers are so lower middle class" are some reasons I have heard for the anti-pressure cooker crowd. However, I love mine and find that is it ever a useful thing to own. I'd like to talk a little bit about using pressure cookers.

First of all, they are very convenient. You can cook daals and meat in a matter of a few whistles (seeTiyan, plural of seeTi in Urdu/Hindi). Whistles? Why do Indian English language cookbooks and recipes refer to whistles? "Cook for 3 whistles." What the heck is a whistle? Well, to know you would have to watch a traditional pressure cooker in action. You add the food and water, you seal the lid, and turn on the flame. The pressure builds, then releases. To release the pressure, steam comes out of the pressure cooker's whistle (regulator). Two to three whistles for most daals, 5 whistles for goat or beef. Like so. I have an Indian pressure cooker. It is traditional. But I have heard that in Amreeka you can get modren pressure cookers that have no seetis. When I relocate to Amreeka, I will have to get one. For now, I am stuck on my seetis. So, you know how you have to simmer beef for 6-8 hours to get it nicely tender? You can pressure cook it for 5 whistles and in about 20 minutes your beef is done. Cooking fuel is expensive in the des for average families, so people save money on cooking gas by using pressure cookers to reduce simmering time. Pressure cookers are economically sound, and good for the environment since they lessen fuel consumption.

There are some downsides to pressure cookers. I love the way large legumes like chickpeas, rajma, and black chickpeas come out in the pressure cooker. They get such a tender texture that allows these legumes to grab on to flavors so well. However, I don't like the end result of how small sized daal comes out. I mean the types of daal that are cooked to a liquidy consistency and are not meant to remain whole. Somehow the pressure cooker makes the liquidy daal fluffy. I don't like the texture. So in my kitchen, I only pressure cook large sized daals which are supposed to remain whole. Secondly, though it is a great meat tenderizer, for me it ruins the taste and texture of beef and goat. The meat also comes out puffy and fluffy. It isn't horrible or anything, but I can always detect pressure cooked meat, and prefer slow simmered meat. I do occasionally resort to pressure cooking red meats as a time saver only. Chicken and fish are a no-no for the pressure cooker, as they would just be obliterated, unless the chicken where you live is quite tough. I do use the pressure cooker to tenderize chicken in specific dishes, though.

After the pressure cooker has done its job, you still have to wait for the pressure created vacuum seal of the lid to release or "fall in." This adds to your cooking time. Some people advise running the pressure cooker under cold water to release the lid. But actually, waiting for the lid to fall in is part of the cooking time of many lentils, so if you release the lid early, the lentils may not be fully cooked in the center. So it is best to wait for the lid to fall in on its own.

The pressure cooker is a necessity in "mehnati" or arduous dishes, like daal makhani. Without the pressure cooker, one would have to babysit this slow simmering daal for 4-5 hours, stirring and mashing away, and adding more and more water as needed. But the pressure cooker reduces your cooking time to 15 minutes of allowing the pot to boil, then waiting for the whistles, and another 10 minutes or so of waiting for the lid. You can't beat that.

I also make stocks in the pressure cooker. For chicken stock that would normally take over an hour, I allow the magic of the pressure cooker to pressurize all of the great flavor out of my stock cuts in around 15 minutes.

You can also use the pressure cooker for some special dishes. For a Lahori style chargha (marinated, cooked, then deep fried Lahore style crispy chicken---recipe coming soon), you can tenderize the chicken so beautifully by giving it one whistle in the pressure cooker, allowing it to cool, and then deep frying. This yields absolutely amazing results.

I know some people who use the pressure cooker for everything. Everything! A friend once told me that people are so stuck on pressure cookers in her part of India, that even their pudding (payasam---South Indian kheer) is pink because apparently milk turns pink in the pressure cooker. Many desi cooks would be lost without it.

Everyone whose family uses pressure cookers had stories of a forgetful auntie who left the pressure cooker unattended and the dang thing exploded, leaving tamaatar saalan stains on the ceiling. So, one should learn from these stories to never leave the pressure cooker unattended and to pay attention to the whistles.

Another note on the small daals: sometimes as they liquify, a tiny piece gets stuck where the steam is supposed to come out, blocking it. This will cause your steam release to spew an ugly yellow daal mess out of the whistle. I have only ever had this happen with daals, but theoretically, any small piece of something could cause the blockage.

I can't wait to use the new modern pressure cookers with their safety features and double seals. But for now, I stick to my old Hawkins quite happily. I advise all people who regularly cook desi foods to invest in one! Luckily mine was cheap over here in Dubai (and it came with a free idli tray!) but I have heard that they can be costly further away from the des.

Still so much to learn

Whenever my mother in-law comes to visit, I am always in awe of how much more I have to learn about desi cooking. My MIL came to our house for the birth of my second daughter to snuggle the new baby and also to help out with the cooking and all. This time she made a delicious chicken dopyaaza "istew" twice. I really liked it. She wrote down the recipe for me, but I am going to cook it myself and try it out before I post it.

Today our housekeeper made khatti daal and I made bhuna gosht (recipe here on blog). We are going to have it with white rice and brown Arabic flatbread. We will also have a "Punjabi salaad," which is what the housekeeper calls a plate of sliced salad vegetables such as cucumbers, daikon radish (mooli), carrots, and tomatos. I like to sprinkle this with some lemon juice and a dash of chaat masala, but my husband prefers it plain. Plus I am lazy. So I usually serve it plain. With a daal, I usually put a chutney or two on the table. Tonight it is a Lebanese chili chutney from the local grocery deli, and some Mitchell's brand mango kasaundi. So that is our dinner. Oh, and there is some left over soya ki sabzi, which in this case is dill cooked with potatoes in a dry masala. The housekeeper made it yesterday.

My MIL tells me that people from her region in U.P./Lucknow usually serve one or two dishes, but set the table with a large variety of chutneys to eat with rice or take a nibble of while eating the main dishes. This is a good idea because it makes the table spread seem more abundant even when you have only cooked the bare minimum of dishes. She says that when she moved to Punjab after her marriage, her Punjabi neighbor would tease her by saying that all she served was chutneys and raitas. I happen to like the idea and I copy it myself.

Do you know what daal is?

My exposure to South Asian food before I become a Muslim was limited to occasional family dinners at the local Star of India Palace type place. I knew NOTHING about South Asian food. I learnt a lot about South Asian cooking after marriage. I think when you are female and in an intermarriage, you get a lot of pressure to learn the cooking of your husband's background. Luckily, my husband eats a lot of different stuff from all over. And luckily I happen to love Pakistani food. So we eat a good variety of international dishes at home. But I have non-Pakistani girl friends married to desi guys who will ONLY eat Pakistani food, even when they go out to restaurants. Anyway, I wanted to learn South Asian cooking because I liked all of the foods I tasted after I accepted Islam and met a lot of desi Muslims, and also after I married a South Asian origin Muslim guy. So I learned to cook desi. Is this a big shock?

Somehow, I seem to have the same conversation with Pakistani Auntie-types. Often the line of questions starts out with "Do you like Pakistani food," or more often "Can you eat spicy food?" "Yes," is my answer. "Can you cook any Pakistani dishes?" "Yes." "What dishes can you cook?" "Hmmm, a lot of them." "Can you make biriani?" "Yes." Actually, I make several types of biriani. Sometimes I get a test question: "How do you make X?" So I have to give a quick recipe for kofta or whatever. I guess I should be more understanding as to why Auntie-types might be incredulous about my cooking skills. I mean, gori cooks desi? Not so common, I guess. I am no star chef, but I am not bad either. Yet it is really hard for them to believe that a gori can cook desi.

Once I was at this dinner party and I had gone through this line of questioning with the hostess. I told her I could cook a lot of desi food. I was using food name terms in Urdu and all. Then, minutes later, she asked me if I knew what daal was. "Do you know what daal is?" She said. After I just told her that I could cook most Pakistani dishes. Sigh. "Jee nahin, daal kya hoti hai?" I mean, "Yes, I know what daal is." She proceeded to tell me that something was wrong with her paalak daal. I asked her what was wrong. "I just don't know, I think I put too much salt." I advised her to add in some lemon juice, and she could perhaps add in some potatoes to suck up the salt, and then remove them before serving the dish. She just thought I was nuts. Later, I tasted her daal. Guess what was wrong with it? She had obviously burned the bottom of the pot, the daal had a strong burnt flavor with an attempt to veil it with a heavy dose of lemon juice. Yuck. How could she not realize that this was the problem? If I were her, I wouldn't have even served that burnt dish. She had lots of other dishes set out anyhow. Anyway, I am no expert, but I just wish people would believe it when I say I can cook a fair bit of Pakistani stuff.

Is it really that hard to believe that a gori can cook desi?

Mah-e-Ramazaan ka pakwaan at Chez Gori

I try to produce healthy and hearty meals during Ramazan. We break our fast with 3-4 dried dates, milk, and water. Often, we have a cup of wholesome soup. We pray, then shortly after, we have a normal meal. I make sure that this meal is well balanced, including a veggie, meat, and carb. We then have a snack of fruit at around 10 pm, before we sleep. I occasionally go on a mad gulab jamun consumption spree and pack back 6 or more of the little suckers. Ramazan blood sugar fluctuations throw my self control out of the window. But I usually attempt to limit the sweets. For breakfast, I have cereal and a banana. My husband has cereal, but occasionally he makes himself a fried egg and eats this with toast or a roghni roti or paratha. He dines on this breakfast more often during the end of Ramazan.

This is the healthy way. This is the way to eat during Ramazan when you want to maintain your stamina and focus on ibaadat and not on the food.

But culturally, Ramazan IS all about the food in many ways.

Ramazan is a time for a breakfast or sehri that is as big as a dinner. Sehri might be parathas and eggs, and also include sweets. Doodh jalebi is a special one in my husband's house. Iftaar starts with a date washed down with rose syrup milk---Rooh Afzah is the syrup of choice to lift the Rooh, or the spirit! Then come the Unidentified Frying Objects: UFOs. Typical UFOs are samosas, pakoras, and kachoris...there might be some dahi bhalle or chaat, too. All these things all together all at once is okay. Why not? Eat as much as you can, then go pray on a stomach filled with greasy fried carbs. Try not to pass wind as you bend into sujood now!

The real meal will be later. Perhaps 9 or 10 pm, maybe later than that. Only crazy goras eat at 6 or 7 pm. Dinner could even be midnight. The closer to bedtime, the better. If you eat very late, you might get to skip sehri and just wake up for fajr namaz. This meal will be heavy and will be topped off with a sweet. Muzzafar, kheer, sevaiyan, shahi tukray...or any number of sweets...YUM! Since you have eaten so much fried stuff just a few hours before in the blood sugar spike fest called iftaar, you won't have too much room for the dinner, so be sure not to eat too much or you won't have space for the sweet.

All of this is fun, but it involves a lot of negatives: it is stressful on the person who has to cook it all at odd hours, it causes heart burn, gas, and smelly burps, and in terms of keeping you pumped up for ibaadat, you are running on the steam of fat and processed carbs, so you aren't getting a balanced diet even if there are some veggies hidden within that coat of pakora batter.

I know, I am such a killjoy!

What I do to honor my husband's Ramazan cultural traditions and foods is this: we have a UFO night at least twice during Ramazan. Our dinner is just pakoras and one other UFO, perhaps samosay or dahi bhallay. That way it is something special, something to relish. The rest of the time, we eat relatively healthfully. Our own family tradition is the Ramazan soup. Okay, soup isn't as fun as a pakora, I know. I know. Like I said, I am a killjoy.

Gori cooks desi: My notes for the gori

It is hard to learn to cook a cuisine that you didn't grow up with. I am a foodie at heart and I love trying new things. Enjoying desi food took away some of the difficulty in actually learning to prepare desi dishes. I think as a gori, if you are open to desi flavors, you can become a successful desi cook.

I learned by sheer trial and error. I made a lot of mistakes. I questioned the aunties. I tried to learn the names of all of the foods and find out how to make them. Authentic South Asian foods are very different from what is served in the average American Star of India restaurant with its creamy dishes like the ubiquitous saag paneer and so forth. It was in peoples' homes that I got exposure to "real" South Asian food. I read a lot of Indian cookbooks. Unfortunately, there simply aren't very many Pakistani cookbooks. There were certainly none available to me when I was learning. Luckily, North Indian cuisine overlaps a lot with Pakistani cuisine due to the obvious shared geography and history and all. Now we have so much more on the web. But nothing beats a good, detailed cookbook.

So, a gori marries a desi. She tries new desi foods and wants to replicate those foods at home. She wants her husband to say that she is a good cook. Not in a "surrendered wife" way. Just cuz it's nice when someone likes your food, especially if that someone is a loved one. Where should said gori start? First of all, from our typical knowledge base goris only know the desi nations, maybe not much more than that. We do not know about the never ending diversity of people in South Asia. I know a gori-wife friend who wanted to surprise her husband by learning to cook Pakistani foods. She took an cookbook of Indian curry recipes from the library---700 Yummy Curries or some such title. Her husband is from a place near to Peshawar. She surprised him with a chicken in coconut milk dish filled with mustard seeds and curry leaves. It didn't go over well. Why not? Typical Pathan cooking doesn't contain coconut milk, curry leaves, or mustard seeds. The food was just as alien to my friend's husband as it was to her. He was actually grossed out by the curry leaves. She was crushed. Where did it go wrong? Well, you may be asking, what the heck is a Pathan? Her husband was one and she didn't know that. In South Asia, communities are divided into regional ethnic groups, castes, and so forth. These identities are paramount to people. Each group has its own unique customs, often its own regional language, and most importantly for the gori wife: its own distinct foods.

If two Pakistanis intermarry, say the husband is Punjabi, and the wife is from an Indian Gujarati origin family, if the family follows a traditional structure, then the wife will have to learn the ins and outs of her husband's family cooking. She may cook some of her Gujarati dishes sometimes, but she must pick up the recipes of her husband's community. That is just the way it is. So, if you are a gori wife and you want to impress your dear husband with your cooking skills, you must know what community your husband is from. You must know the standard recipes of that community, and if possible, the specifics of his family's recipes.

My own husband is pretty broad minded and likes a lot of different foods. I cook a lot of New American, Italian, Cantonese, Thai, Vietnamese, Mexican, Korean, South Indian, whatever at home. He eats it all, and has international favorites. He loves Korean barbecue, he savors a good steak. But he loves recipes from his particular community, and also from his family. So I have learned those as well.

So, the first step a gori should take is to learn what her husband's family background is, and what repercussions that has on the style of desi cooking she will learn.

My husband's family is what in Pakistan is known as "Urdu speaking," "Hindustani," or "muhajir." Both of his parents were born in India and emigrated to Pakistan when they were young. If you know your husband is "Urdu speaking," don't leave it at that. Where in India are his family's roots? That is an important question that will affect the cooking you aim to learn. His family could be from Bhopal, Hyderabad, Delhi, or any of a million places...each with special recipes. My husband's family's roots are from the general U.P. area, specifically Dehli, Dehra Doon, and Lucknow. This has huge implications on the way his family cooks and eats. His family settled in Punjab in Pakistan. Punjabi cuisine is similar...it all seems the same at first to us goray---but it is distinct. For example, some Pakistani favorites of my husband's family are made with a yoghurt based gravy instead of a Punjabi style tomato gravy. There are foods that my husband's family prefers to eat with rice, whereas people from the Punjab would have these foods with whole wheat flat bread---though my husband's family usually has both rice and flat bread at every meal. I could go on an on. Anyhow, if you were raised knowing all of this stuff, great. But it is mind boggling for a neophyte gori wife. Give yourself time to research. Don't be afraid to ask people for recipes and request that they specify their community. It is normal for desis to know each others' communities when they interact. In terms of what is available to you, most North Indian style cookbooks are suitable for both U.P. and Punjabi recipes. Most online Pakistani recipe sources also cater to the U.P. emigrant or Punjabi style---what is thought of as "standard Pakistani food" are the foods of these two communities. Shan Masala caters to that generic style as well. But if your husband's community is from Hyderabad, India, or he is a Pathan, or a Memon, or whatever, you will have to find out the culinary nuances of his particular community and may have a more difficult time with recipe sources. Don't worry, there is so much out there on the net these days.

I personally don't appreciate a picky man---hopefully your guy is satisfied with whatever you put forth on the table, even better for you if he gets in the kitchen himself. But come on goris, you know you want to learn to cook desi and get stuff right. So here I am presenting my humble advice on how to learn to cook in a way that honors your husband's family tradition.