Hello Mamta and other users;

I am taking the liberty of asking another elementary question on cooking Indian food.

I have looked at some cookbooks that talk about "tarka" while preparing different curries but they do not state the reasons for doing so. I would very much like to know why it is important and what is the correct way to do it.

Thank you.

Regards,

Alpesh.

Hello Alpesh Parekh

In answer to your question, there are a few methods of cooking that cover most savoury Indian dishes and they all have a reason for their use. Tarka is one of these methods. I will write a little about all of them, just in case you want to know ;-)!

1. Tarka or tempering: This is done by adding whole and some ground spices to hot oil, at the beginning of a dish. There are two main reasons for Tarka as I see them; a. Tarka adds flavour to the dish, more than if you get if you just added the spices to a cooking dish. B Many ingredients of tarka, like cumin seeds, asafoetida, and whole spices like cardamoms, cloves, cinnamon and even chillies, have health benefits when cooked this way. They negate some of the unpleasant effects of certain Indian foods. For example, cumin and asafoetida when roasted/heated, are good for digestion, as well for reducing flatulence.

2. Bhuna, often described as Bhunao: This means stir frying at moderately high to high heat. This is a quick method of sealing of meats, vegetables etc. It is also used when you fry masala for curries, or when you finish off a vegetable bhaji, to dry off the excess liquid and give it a shiny finish.

3. Dhuan or smoke: In India, this is often used in conjunction with ?Tarka? for dals, using an iron ladle. The ladle is heated to really hot on direct flame/heat source. Oil/ghee is added and once it is melted, cumin seeds (or other seeds you may be using), asafetida and chilli powder (sometimes whole chillies too) are added in quick succession. They crackle very fast, within seconds. Then the ladle is dunked in the dal, the lid closed and the smoky flavours are allowed to infuse. Don?t peep in, because the dal can splash onto your face! There is a loud hiss and smoke fills under the lid as the hot ladle goes in the dal. It is important to keep the lid closed to stop the flavours from escaping. Some restaurants use an iron ?BBQ coal? to smoke many of their dishes. This ?coal? is heated on flame and then dunked in the pot of dish you want to smoke (I still haven?t found one, if anyone has, please let me know). You can also smoke some vegetables by cooking them directly on gas flame, like aubergine or baingan for Bhurta. This gives the dish a lovely, ?smoky? flavour.

4. Dum: This is a slow cooking process, where food is cooked in it?s own steam. In traditional method, the lid of a pot was sealed with dough. The pot was then placed on slow heat and some hot charcoals were placed on the lid. This allowed the aromas and flavours to stay in, not escape. This method is commonly used to ?dum? a Biryani by many cooks. These days, many people obtain a similar effect by slow cooking in an oven.

5. Talna: Deep frying in oil or ghee, which makes them crisp. For many dishes, it is a quick fry, like papodoms, for others it is either a gentle frying, like for Mathari or moderate heat frying like for samosai.

6. Tandoor cooking; last but not the least, this a traditional and a well known method of cooking many Indian foods. Tandoor is a clay oven that is heated to a high temperature. The food is cooked fast. Electric ovens at their highest setting are often used these days, but seldom give the results of a proper tandoor.

Mamta

PS I will add more, as I remember them and get around to writing them!

Thanks Mamta.... I found your article very interesting. Some of the words I remember my mum using when I was quite young.... and that was a long, long time ago.

Regards

JL

Hello Mamta;

Thanks once again for your expert reply. This was exactly what I was looking for.

Regards,

Alpesh.

Well I never realised thats what "bhuna" means !!... so you could travel the world ordering "chicken bhuna" and never get the same dish twice ! ?

Thanks for that really infromative set of explanations, Mamta.

Like Steve, I'd had no idea where the term 'bhuna' came from. But I guess that, in Indian restaurants in Britain, it now designates a specific kind of British/Indian dish, regardless of the etymology of the word.

What about the origin of those other common names for dishes in Indian restaurants in the UK, e.g. 'dupiaza', 'rogan ghosh', etc? (I found out the etymological origin of 'vindaloo', and I guess that the word 'dhansak/dansak' means 'lentils').

Phil

Dopiaza translates to "two onions" and simply denotes a dish with more onions than might normally be used in a similar curry.

Looked up rogan josh (which is the spelling I've encountered most often in the UK) on the internet.

Found all of the following so I'm no clearer than I was before. I find it interesting that so many places translate meat/ gosht to "lamb" when mutton would, I think, more commonly have been used for the dish.

"Rogan Josh is a tomato/red pepper based lamb curry dish. It originated in Northern India but the name of the dish is a concoction of the Western world. Rogan indicates red for either the tomatoes or red peppers and Josh represents lamb. "

"Rogan josh is an aromatic lamb curry dish. It originated in Northern India, and is particularly associated with Kashmir. 'Roghan' means oil in Persian & Urdu, probably indicating the cooking medium (although some argue that it is a reference to its characteristic red color) and Josh is a corruption of 'Gosht', meaning meat. It's said to have been first made and tasted at the court of the Nawab of Lucknow."

"'Rogan Josh' translates literally as red meat juice."

"The literal translation for the name of this dish from Kashmir is 'red lamb'. The colour comes from the Kashmiri dry red chillies used in it. The name may sound fiery but the dish's heat is toned down by the cream that is added at the end."

"Translated literally, Rogan Josh means "Red Meat", so named because of the colour paprika gives it."

Around here (oop North) Rogan Josh can be any meat in a dish that is quite hot and heavy in tomato...

I'd guess that somewhere in the distant past (like many other food names) a "mistake" has been made (in translation) and what someone/ a group thought they were being told has been mistranslated and adopted by the many.

Maybe in time gone by a dish with lamb and lots of tomatoes was given to someone and the person asked what it was. They might have been told its Rogan Josh which refered to it being a red lamb dish with certain spices, but they might have thought it was only the sauce with tomatoes. They then thought any spicy curry with lots of tomatoes (no matter what meat or pulse? was in it) would be called a Something Rogan Josh.

Like Bhuna, it might have been a dish cooked in a certain way a bit like saying its "stirfry" but they confused that particular taste with being a bhuna (but as we know there are many many different stir fry's).

I'd still like to know exactly how "onion bahji" became the dense pakora type object we see in takeaways and who confused that issue...

Steve

I hope this gets through (just had a Spam blockage)

'Rogan' could be cognate (as we say in linguistics) with 'rouge'

And 'do' could be cognate with 'two', 'dos', etc

Phil

Sorry for the derail, but Phil do you remember any details about the message you were posting when you got the spam blocking? It's mainly keyword driven (although I'm just off to add some slightly more sophisticated tweaks after our latest bouts!) and it's possible I've managed to introduce a restriction where I shouldn't!

Drop me a line at webmaster@mamtaskitchen.com - thanks muchly!

Pete the AntiSpammer

Thanks for that, Kavita. Why have I still not developed the habit of just Googling for things like this?

Yes, it IS 'Josh', not 'Ghosht': I was mixing up two different things. And that kind of mixing up is perhaps where all this variation comes from!

Phil

Hello Mamta;

I would like to restart this thread as I have another "perplexing" question to ask you and other members pertaining to "tarka".

Recipes for many dishes recommend using black mustard seeds for tarka whereas for other dishes the recommendation is to use cumin seeds.

Are there specific rules to follow for this?

Please let me know.

Thank you for your time.

Regards;

Alpesh.

Well Alpesh, there are no strict rules about 'tarka', but basically North Indian use cumin seeds for most dishes and South Indians, Bengalis, Gujraties, Biharis use mustard seeds or Panch pooran. Then, pickle type of dishes will use Nigella/kalaunji seeds. Stuffed vegetables like Karela (bitter gourd) often have fennel seeds tarka. These days, people mix and match all kinds of seeds, including coriander seeds, for all kind of dishes, irrespective of where they are from.

In old days, there was a reason behind, based on Ayurvedic medicine teachings. Different seeds/spices/cooking methods made different food more beneficial and easier to digest. Everyone eats everyone else?s cuisine these days< i am glad to say. I am from North India, so I mostly use cumin seeds, but change to other seeds frequently. I can't imagine my grandmother ever using mustard seeds for Tarka, ever!

Where are you folks from, I mean which part of India?

Mamta

Hello Mamta;

Thank you very much for your lightning-fast reply to my earlier question. Your answer makes a lot of sense to me.

I am originally from Bombay. I reside in Portland, OR here in the U.S.A. My wife is not Indian and she does not like a whole lot of Indian food. Therefore; I started to cook Indian dishes on a regular basis. I find cooking to be a very joyful and relaxing experience.

Regards;

Alpesh.

may I put in my 2 ruppee's worth.

Tarkas (tadka, chownk) are prepared by frying spices in hot oil. This is done to extract the flavours of the spice into the oil. This is often done because the method of cooking the dish that the tadka is added to did not have (any appreciable) oil frying step, and would othewise lack a depth of flavour, as the spices would not be extracted effectively into a water based medium.

This also explains why food is fried (bhunoed) where a meat is heated in a little oil, the spices added have their flavour extracted into the oil, but stopped from burning by adding a little water to quickly lower the temperature.

And on 'rogan josh', the Kashmiri transliteration is 'warming fat', as the final dish is mostly melted lamb fat over yoghurt solids. Note, there is no tomato or cream in a rogan josh, and it belongs to the Korma family of dishes, meaning a braised dish. The red colour is derived from real Kashmiri chillies (neither really red nor mild pungency) and/or mawal, a flower of the cockscomb family.

cheers

Waaza

hi everyone,

Tadke ke bina khana bhi kya khana hai!! This is what brings in the essence to any dish. The mustard and jeera seeds, also curry leaves, ginger-garlic, taj-laving etc bring out the flavour of the oil. These raw "tadka" spices have no flavour by themselves, but they r absolutely necessary friends of any food ingredient to enhance the taste...

Be it dal, rice, curries or some snacks, don't ever be afraid of giving a Tadka!!

Thanks,

-Mansi

I hate to disagree Mansi, but it is the spices which give flavour to the oil. The chemicals in each spice (which are very well characterized) are usually more soluble in oil than in water, so if one is preparing a dish which has little or no oil/fat in it, it will be quite difficult to extract those flavours into the water based ingredients. Adding a tarka (etc.) at the end provides other (oil soluble) flavours, giving depth to the dish. In Bengali cooking, frying a little panch phoran in oil at the start of a dish preparation has the same effect.

See http://cumbrianfoodlab.blogspot.com/ if you wish to know more.

cheers

Waaza

Thanks for all this interesting info, folks.

Whay is 'tarka' also spelled 'tadka'? Is this just because the 'r' sound is like the sound you get in words such as 'city' in American English (like a short 'd')

Phil

different words, Phil,

you should know that in India, there are many words with the same meaning, and several meanings for the same word. Complicate that with many languages, and you have life :?)

Other words from Indian languages, meaning 'to temper':

Hindi- chaunk, tarka, tadka, baghar

Bengali- bagar, bagar dewa

Tamil - thalchi

Kannada- oggaraNe, vaggaraNe

Teluga- popu, thiruguvaatha

Marathi- phodani

cheers

Waaza

I've just been watching an episode of "rhodes in India" (I think) where Gary Rhodes has been sent out to see some real cooking. He was shown how to make Dal and how to Tarka it.... This particular chef was doing it in several stages. The Dal when well cooked had chillies fried off and then added. He then did another pan of garlic and ginger added it.. and a bit later he added some well fried onions ....

Steve

oh and another thing totally off topic but interesting was the word "Punjab" is made of two words one meaning 5 and the other meaning water. This is because the area is where 5 rivers meet each other...

Steve

and I bet you didn't know that Punjab is the 'P' in Pakistan! Can you work out the rest, 'K' is easy, so is 'S'... :?)

It is possible to temper all at once, you just add the ingredients at different times, maybe the chef showing GR what it was all about wanted to show it happening more slowly, or he wasn't that confident. Generally, the dryer the ingredient, the later it is added to the hot oil.

cheers

Waaza

The chef was in some top hotel (or similar) and obviously GR (Gary Rhodes, not Gordon Ramsey lol ) had gone to him as he must be well known for being the top in his field.

So I guess he had reason to do it in stages? It was pretty much one after the other within a minute or so. Could it possibly be to keep the spice flavours more individual in the Tarka'ing ? You know so if you get a cumin seed it tastes of cumin rather than tainted with garlic or something it had been cooked up with ??

Steve

I will be back tomorrow. I am sitting in the BA's airport longe in Singapore at present! Greetings to you all.

Yes Steve, Punjab is the land of 5 rivers, a fertile land.

Tarka can be done in many different ways. A dish called Kadhi for example has a tarka when you start it off and then one at the end. It also varies from dish to dish and from area t- area in India. My way is usually (not always) the way it is done by my family and friends:-)!

Mamta