Reinventing Family Recipes: Add Your Own Touch
Though most of us don’t comprehend or articulate the thought often, it is true that the food prepared at home holds much more value than just something to fill a hungry stomach. Food goes much beyond the mere gastronomic into emotional territory — certain food triggers childhood memories, or reminds you of your grandmother, or even takes you back to a happy vacation spent with a loved one.
The rush of everyday life has disconnected us from the traditional family recipes that we used to love and devour as children. Think back to vacations spent at your grandparents’ home: there would be a delectable spread of homemade cooking for every meal, a range of pickles and chutneys that your grandmother made from scratch, and even herbs and spices ground at home to enhance the flavour. Today, many recipes are lost or relegated to fond memories. But as a professional chef, you now have the knowledge and talent to recreate these same family classics, even if the recipes are lost to time.
Here’s a good starting point: reinvent the gravy.
Gravies: There’s no main course without one!
Indian food relies on textures, warm to hot temperature and consistency of flavour to deliver on taste and an overall satisfying gastronomic experience. Most Indians prefer to have a ‘wet’ component in the plate, such as a gravy or sauce that complements rotis, parathas or rice. Most main courses in Indian cooking comprise the most basic Indian gravies in a multitude of colours, consistencies and tastes. Whether it is a non-vegetarian curry or a paneer recipe, a gravy is a must as a base to offer flavour and textural versatility.
The most common ingredients used in making most gravies are onions and tomatoes. Vastly different from each other in taste and appearance, both vegetables combine to provide a solid base of flavour in an onion tomato gravy that binds nicely with whatever else you add to it, from spices to nuts, and from vegetable cubes to whole vegetable pieces.
Onion tomato gravies are the base for most red, orange, green and brown Indian gravies across several cuisines. So if you wish to recreate a traditional family recipe, a good starting point would be with the onion tomato gravies that your grandmother and/or mother has been making all along.
Recreating the magic, with some of your own
As a professional chef, you are tasked with catering to large groups of people in a matter of minutes. It helps to have ready masalas and gravy or dip preparations at hand instead of creating them from scratch.
Whether you are working in your professional kitchen or whipping up a meal for a large group of family and friends at home, it helps to save time when recreating a family favourite recipe — without losing any of the taste and authenticity of the original. You will find that many recipes passed from generation to generation are often quite fiddly in terms of the number of ingredients, the number of steps and processes to follow, and the overall prep and cooking time involved. Chefs around the world use ready food flavouring powders, or bases for creating gravies and dips, that cut several steps and save time in the cooking process. The time you save can be used to perfect the family recipe, or add new touches with new ingredients.
We urge you to record your culinary creations in a journal with tips and photographs for your own children and grandchildren to follow. After all, that’s how a rich food legacy is created!
