Mamta's Kitchen

Post Message

Please note: Commercial or inappropriate messages will be deleted. Thank you!

On 2/11/2018 05:06pm, Mamta posted:

Hello Carol

I am sorry that your husband can not eat tomatoes any longer, but that is not the end of Indian cooking :).

By ‘Curry’ you mean dishes with a sauce? Because most stir-fried type of vegetable dishes are called Bhaji on my website and Bhaji or sabji or tarkari in northern India, where I come from. Bhajies are almost always made without tomatoes in my house. The curries, or dishes with a sauce are the things where use of tomatoes has exploded in recent years. They are tasty and colourful, but not essential.

Helen is absolutely right. Adding tomatoes to most curry sauce is a fairly late thing, only from my generation onwards. When I was a child, tomatoes in India were very seasonal, localised to various states of India only and quite expensive. The season was quite short too. We were lucky, because my father was fond of gardening and always grew them, plus tinned some, as well as bottled sauce. But even so, in summer, there were no tomatoes for everyday use. And, my mum, like most other people in northern India, cooked mostly without tomatoes. Many regional cuisines of India are still cooked without tomatoes.

You can make perfectly good curries without tomatoes, sometimes adding yoghurt/tamarind, if you need a little tartness. You can, but you don’t have to substitute it with yoghurt/tamarind. In some parts of India, like Goa, they have used vinegar and still do. Try making a curry as described and omit the tomtoes, and see what happens. You will find that it is still pretty tasty. If you need to thicken a particular curry sauce, add a mashed potato to the sauce.

You follow any curry recipe until adding tomatoes. Then do one of the following

1. Just don’t add tomatoes/yoghurt and carry on. Add spices to fried onions, stir a little and then quickly adding main ingredients, then water. Without tomatoes, spices may burn quickly in hot oil, if you are not careful.

2. If you like slight tartness in your curry, you can always add a little tamarind paste or a dash of lemon juice. I add lemon juice only at the end.

3. The sauce can be thickened a little chickpea flour (besan), just like you add plain flour in Western cooking.

I will see if I can remember/get around to mark my recipes without tomatoes as tomato free, so they come up on search.

Mamta


Content copyright ©2001-2024 Mamta Gupta and F² Limited. (All rights reserved. No copying without permission.)
Layout and design ©2001-2024 F² Limited. (All rights reserved. No copying without permission.)
Hosted on Mythic Beasts
All comments and queries to webmaster@mamtaskitchen.com