Kebabs, Chutneys & Breads

India’s cuisine is very rich and varied and kebabs, with chutneys and breads, are the special repasts that please the gourmet’s tongue and provide the nutrition that the body needs. The celebrated American humorist Mark Twain once remarked- To eat is human, -to digest divine. Kebabs, rightly prepared and served with the right chutneys, are not only tasty, they are easily digestible too.

Kebabs originated from Turkey and evolved into the food for connoisseurs. India is home to a vast variety of kebabs that are cooked in a tandoor, an open iron grill, shallow-fried or deep-fried, or cooked on a griddle. Of these, tandoori kebabs are by far the most popular. The taste and food-value of then kebab depends on the succulence or freshness of the tender meats, fish or vegetables, the size, marination and the right degree of cooking. Each preparation has a distinct taste because of the different texture of meats and the varying fragrance of the different combinations of spices used in the marination.

When a piece of meat is plunged into a hot tandoor, where the temperature is about 400 degrees Celsius, the outer portion of the meat is roasted to a kind of a seal that keeps the vital juice inside the meant when the cooking process is on at a steady 180 degrees Celsius. Whether it is seekh kebab, tandoori chicken or fish tikka, vegetable kebab or paneer tikka,or even the whole leg of a baby lam, it is the succulence of meat, the retention of juices in a piece of dry cooked meat that is the essence of the mastery of tandoori cooking.

This book gives the reader an indepth knowledge of the intricacies and finesse that is the basic of a wide variety of mouth-watering kebabs of Indian cuisine.