Hi,

I am so thrilled to find your website. I love Indian cooking and your recipes look wonderful, easy enough for this western cook to follow. I do have a question about your recipes. When the recipe calls for chilli powder, what kind of chilli powder is it. I have access to some pure ground mexican chilies, or cayenne. Would these substitute, or should I order some Indian chilli powder.

Thanks so much! We are actually having a culturally diverse Christmas dinner. I am cooking an Indian feast!

Lee H

Hello Lee

Welcome!

Chillies vary in heat. I use the medium hot Indian chilli powder. I don't like my food to be too hot, it destroyes the flavour of other spices and numbs your tongue. So, the answer will have to be 'to your taste'.

Mamta

PS You do not have to register to post on my forum, just fill the boxes Message Subjet and User Name.

Hello Lee,

I have found that using ingredients as near to those found in India tend to make better tasting food. Ingredients such as onions, yoghurt and chillies do seem to make a difference, IMHO.

Of the 250 - 300 varieties of chillies grown in India, only a few make it to other shores. Of these, the variety known as sanam are the commonest, followed by mundu (the round ones) Byadgi (usually called Kashmiri, although they aren't) and dani (bird'seye). These four have a complete specrum of heat and colour.

Chilli powder means different things to different people. In many countries, the chillies used could be anything, so the heat level can be a bit variable. For Indian food, I would stay clear of anything other than Indian chilli powder, and definitely anything that looks too dark or too red. In the US, their 'chilli powder' refers to a powder that is used to make chilli con carne, and contains cumin and salt in addition to chilli powder, not what you want, and cayenne pepper is not made from the variety cayenne, but named after the port in South America from which it was exported.

My suggestion is to use whole Indian chillies, and grind them yourself. The powder can be mixed with paprika (same genus) in any proportion to get any heat level you wish, but giving the same amount of colour.

HTH

Be carful with grinding your own chillies. They get everywhere, your eyesm, your nose, if you are not careful!

I'd be interested in growing a few Indian varieties of chilli next year. I'll have to keep my eyes open for the seeds. Any recommendations are most welcome.

I mostly grow habaneros, scotch bonnets, nagas, etc. I don't really use those varieties in Indian cooking because they impart a flavour that just doesn't seem to belong there. The type of chillies that I use in Indian cooking are usually green finder chillies or bullet chillies.

whatever you can find, Andrew, as long as they come from India. Common varieties are sanam (long sword like, straight one side, bent the other, about 100mm long) mundu (round), Byadgi (also known as 'Kashmiri', but aren't, very wrinkled) and dani (birdseye) very hot and small. These can be sourced from Indian shops.

If you want some seeds from seed suppliers, they usually only deal with hybrids, such as jwala, NP46 and about 30 others. These are OK for cropping, but don't have much flavour (if that is what you are after).

As you don't use habs/Mexican in any Indian food, we are of the same mind, but same goes for Nagas, which are of the same species as Habs.

Of the chillies I have used in Indian food not from India, I would recommend cayenne, Thai (maybe a kind of tabasco) and Madagascan birdseye. I would steer clear of thick walled varieties, like most Mexican/American, unless you macerate them with oil to extract the heat and colour first.

I will start the search for some Indian varieties. Of the chillies I do grow then ones I tend to use in Indian cooking are the annum variety. I have lots and lots of chillies in the freezer and some drying out for seeds next year. I used some golden cayenne chillies in a Sambhar that I made earlier today.

annuum is a species, not a variety. Of the five species of chillies cultivated world-wide, except for naga chillies, which are capsicum chinense and of dubious origin! all other Indian chillies are either cap. annuum or cap. frutescens.

Cap frutescens are smaller than others, and include birdseye and Kanthari white (which I believe is a variant of tabasco). Most of the others are annuum, typically long and thin and thin skinned, like sanam and Byadgi, but probably including mundu.

Of the 30 hybrids I know about, all are annuum.

Cayenne chillies are good for Indian food, IMHO, as they are thin skinned. They may be the parents of many Indian chillis. Someone has suggested that originally, three types of chilli were imported into Goa by the Portuguese. One must have been mundu, and another an annuum, which leaves a large one which gave us the rashampati types.

A friend in Bangalore had been to Kashmir and brought back a large bag of real Kashmiri chillies. One rainy afternoon, I looked through his Kashmiri chillies, and started to arrange them into morphological families. There were about 21 different shapes, but once arranged logically, it could be seen that they all could be derived from just two types, a long sanan type, and a shorter fatter reshampatti type, both cap. annuum. As chillies cross fertilise so easily, it wasn't difficult to imagine what happened.

Last week I happened to taste "Naga Naryal" - lamb/chicken tikka cooked with naga chilli and coconut and coriander sauce. It was fantastic.

a strange dish, derived from all corners of India! Fusion or confusion?

Could be Bengali dish, as it is a Bengali restaurant.

although coconut may have originated around the Ganges delta, I associate this kind of dish with the south. Chicken Tikka is from the Punjab, only the Nagas may be from NE India, though also grown in the UK, now. It would be nice to see only Bengali dishes offered in a Bengali restaurant, but that is unlikely.

Most restaurants in the UK are run by Bangladeshis, some Bengalis and some Punjabi, a very few are from southern India, but apart from the latter, most restaurants dish up their idea of Indian food, and fail miserably.

Thank goodness for Mamta and this forum.

True, unless and until someone has been to India and tasted food there you cannot tell the difference. One of the indian restaurants near my area is a superhit and is house full every evening, but when I tried their food it was sort of bland sans the distinguishable aroma and "kick" of a curry. It was cooked to suit the palate of UK residents (I rarely see any asians dining there :) )

Hi,

Thanks for responding to my question. Can you tell me a good online resource to by Indian spices?

If you open any of our recipes, there is a link on the bottom of it;

http://www.spicesofindia.co.uk/?referrer=mamtaskitchen

I have just come back from Mauritius, in the hotel we stayed in they served Curry of one type or another most nights but they were very mild but there was a side dish of chillie paste which was fantastic, it looked to have a milky base is this just the juice from the chillies or something used to to add moisture ?

Great site I will keep looking Bill

Difficult to tell what it was Bill. Did you not aks the hotel chef? I do and they are very obliging, usually!

Thanks Mamta your right I should have asked hope to go back one day just hope its not to long

Thanks again Bill

I have a local supplier of fresh Madagascan chillies, and they are very like NE Indian dani, or birdseye chillies. They are, in this respect, no different from any other small chilli, and I don't think any 'milk' can be had from any of them.