Rasoi: New Indian Kitchen By Vineet Bhatia
Indian food has a reputation for being cheap and casual. Outside India, myriad restaurants do a disservice to the complexities of the cuisine, claiming to serve dishes from every region in the country but with a repertoire of only four or five sauces in various levels of spiciness, from hot to incendiary. All the customer has to do is pick the meat: chicken, mutton or pork.
But anyone who's eaten at a really good Indian restaurant, or at an Indian home, where the food is cooked with care, knows how refined and delicious the cuisine can be.
Vineet Bhatia was the first Indian chef-patron to receive a Michelin star - for his first London restaurant, Zaika, and, after it closed, for his second restaurant, Rasoi. Cheap and cheerful curry-house cooking, this is not.
Rasoi: New Indian Kitchen opens with the basics - what Bhatia calls 'invisible work' - the pastes, marinades, flavoured oils, butters and powders that are essential to the final flavour yet allow the meat, seafood or vegetables to take the glory. Many of the ingredients in the book are obviously Indian; others - such as squid ink, wild mushroom and truffle oil - are not.
Bhatia's recipes are not for novice cooks. Dishes use multiple components, although some can be prepared in advance. Recipes include roast lobster with curry leaf, broccoli khichdi and spiced lobster jus; achari pheasant breast, baingan bharta with peas and poppyseed-crusted pheasant tikki; home-smoked tandoori lamb rump, silken saffron mash, lamb samosas, spiced mint jus and lemongrass foam; cardamom panna cotta with fresh rose petal kulfi, berries and rose petal coulis; and roasted tandoori pineapple infused with saffron and fennel, pineapple and saffron halwa and warm coconut milk shooters.