Mamta's Kitchen - A Family Cookbook





Tempering / Tarka

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On 13/05/2010 07:05pm, azelias kitchen wrote:

Hi Mamta

I'm interested to know a little about tempering, I've looked through some of your recipes that have it so would be interested in your knowledge.

From cooking curries 20yrs ago in the UK to cooking curries now I didn't come across the words 'tempering a curry' until the recent years but I've become aware how important a process it is in the recipe...as much as the spices in the main recipe it seems....would you say that's a correct assumption?

I also have the impression the tempering is a personal choice to the cook of that recipe?

or are there certain no no with combination of particular spices in tempering?

....I was thinking of rules as you get in certain cultures...as with Italians they wouldn't sprinkle parmesan over a fish pasta dish type of thing...

az?lia

On 13/05/2010 08:05pm, Mamta wrote:

That is a huge question Az?lia, I will try to answer it.

Tempering or tarka/tadka (actual sound is somewhere between tarka and tadka) is an important part of Indian cooking, with sound reasons behind doing it. Obviously you can choose to use it or not, but I think it improves the taste of Indian food. Things like dals will not be half as tasty without it!

There are many different ways of doing it, but the basic is heating some oil/ghee and then adding one of these seeds, like cumin or mustard (usually black mustard/ rai) or carom or fenugreek or fennel, or a mix of a few of these seeds. North Indian cuisine may also have asafetida or Hing,/i> resin. In south Indian cuisine, there may also be curry leaves and a little of urad and chana dals. This gives the dishes a uniquely Indian and regional flavours that you can smell a few houses down the road!

If you are cooking vegetables, this also helps to release some of the fat soluble vitamins, which will probably not be absorbed otherwise. Lapin will probably comment better than me on this. So, the oil added this way to vegetables, helps to release them for absorption. Hing, cumin, fennel, carom are all helpful in digestion and some of these help to reduce flatulence as well, resulting from a lentil and bean rich Indian diet.

You may not have heard of tempering, but you may have heard of the ?word tarka? Until a few years ago, people in England were basically using curry powders and often eating Vesta Curries!! May be that is why you did not hear of this technique until recently.

Off the top of my head, I can?t think of dishes where you MUST NOT use tarka.

Mamta

On 13/05/2010 09:05pm, Lapin wrote:

I think az?lia is correct in that most older books on Indian cooking (for the Western market) did not mention non-western techniques, which abound in Indian cusine. If tempering is found outside of the Indian sub-cntinent, it is not common.

Heating spices and other ingredients in hot oil provides flavours which are not present (certainly not to the same extent) in dishes which start with frying onions, for example. Even in Bengali dishes, which often start with frying panch poran, the flavour mellows, and some is lost to the air. With tempering, most of the flavour is present in the oil (hot oil extraction) but some are unusual, like quick fried garlic or chillies.

Vitamins fried in hot oil will most likely breakdown.

[i]Test[/1] [b]Test[/b]

On 13/05/2010 10:05pm, azelias kitchen wrote:

thanks Mamta & Lapin for the responses

I make a curry from scratch although I have if going for a lazy curry used the paste mix (not the curry ready made in jars but jars of paste) and add to it to top it up.

I wasn't here when the raisins were part of curry mixtures available in the UK you see occasionally programs showing on old tv commercials...

I started to cook curries towards the end 80's - but there are still curry books I've bought in the latter years that fails to give you tempering...things have changed considerably and our access to better books/recipes and even my local Indian restaurant is finally given more choice from the usual - thank goodness! But it takes time it seems to get people away from the norm....

On 14/05/2010 09:05am, Rajneesh wrote:

Lapin ????????...new entry??

On 15/05/2010 11:05am, Winton wrote:

What on earth has Lapis done to deserve to become a rabbit? An experiment that went one stage too far? Luckily at least it hasn't effected her valued scientific contributions on-site!

On 16/05/2010 04:05pm, Lapis wrote:

just another typo, I would guess, 'though I was born in the Chinese year of the rabbit..............

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