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Gourmet up your everyday food with these expert tips
While you are hooked on to the latest season of MasterChef Australia, bring out the chef in you with these trade secrets to upgrade your home cooking to restaurant standards.
Chennai
For many food lovers across our country, the television show MasterChef Australia has been nothing short of a culinary school. From teaching us how to sous-vide (cooking food in a water bath under vacuum), basting meats, baking even the most complex French dessert of croquembouche (a tower of cream puffs) — we all owe it to the show for introducing us to a multitude of cuisines. With the show’s latest season on, millions are glued to their TV sets again. Winning hearts across the globe was the Indian-origin contestant Sandeep Pandit, who demonstrated that a simple lemon rice could also be elevated for a gourmet experience. With that inspiration, if you want to try your hand at stepping up your dining table to a restaurant-style experience, here are some industry tips that can come in handy.
Make right use of the spices
Whether you’re making a plain dal or any curry, throwing in your curry leaves right at the beginning of the cook will only leave them dried up and flavourless. Instead add them to your dish towards the absolute end of the cook, so they can add their freshness to it. Also, it makes your meal look greener to nail that food show-worthy dish. City-based whole-food, plant-based chef and consultant Neelima Sriram asks you to remember that ‘Less is more’, when it comes to spices. “Use few spices instead of loading up a dish with too many masalas,” she says. You can also use a muslin cloth to infuse the spices into the dish and remove them.
Value your ingredients
One of the things that chefs beat us hollow is at being resourceful. They don’t let anything go to waste and make the best out of even vegetable peels and scraps. For instance, the next time you make a curry and end up with several vegetable peels and unused veggie portions, including coriander stalks, at the end of the meal prep, wash and throw them in a pot of hot water. The peels infuse their flavours into the water leaving you with a flavoursome vegetable broth, which can be used in soups, or use a few ladles of the broth while making quinoa or risotto.
Textures are the key
When we’re watching any cooking show, the word texture gets thrown around way too often. Chefs say that bringing different textures to work together is what they aim at while creating a dish. For instance, if you are looking to cook cauliflower, you could think of making a puree, roasting it, using the leaves or turning the cauliflower into a crisp. Bear in mind that to nail down a restaurant-style dish, you need three elements — a puree, an element with a bite and an element with a crunch. With a few experiments, you are sure to be thinking like the chefs do.
Style your plate
Chef Neelima concurs with the saying that we eat with our eyes first. “With little effort, we can elevate the way each of our everyday dishes look, making them more enticing. Having cookie cutters and moulds handy would help in giving a great presentation to everyday dishes. Micro-greens are another element that add lot of freshness to the dish,” she says. Aim at making your plate look less cluttered. If you’ve made a kofta curry, Neelima says instead of adding the koftas to the curry and cooking it for too long, she suggests keeping koftas aside and plating them over a base of gravy to make it appealing.
Use fresh herbs and spices
It’s not rocket science, but fresh ingredients that make a dish taste umpteen times better than it does with not-so-fresh ingredients. There’s a world of difference between a sprig of fresh thyme and the dried one. The next time you’re making a pasta, try sourcing fresh basil or thyme, instead of the dried herbs and see your dish be instantly uplifted with freshness and rich with flavour. The same formula applies to spices as well. It is the extra few minutes that chefs spend in pounding fresh ingredients like ginger, garlic, cardamom and cloves that makes all the difference to curries.
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