get the recipe: Red Chili Shrimp
“You’re cooking with Indian flavors, but you’re making something that’s already made,” she said of the dish. Her latest book, which also includes streamlined Indian curries and dals, offers tips for using Indian spices even when you’re not cooking Indian food itself. For example, slip a pinch of garam masala into cookie dough or pie crust, or brush pineapple with ghee or chai spices. before grilling.
Kaimal, who has worked in the food scene for more than 20 years, has watched American home cooks adapt to the world’s cuisines.It is reflected in the success of Maya Kaimal Foodsis a business she started with her husband, journalist Guy Lawson, in 2013 to fill a gap in the U.S. market, she said. Much of Indian food at that time was imported from England and had too much sugar and preservatives. Kaimal wanted to offer her homemade flavors and natural ingredients.
The couple, who now live in New York’s Hudson Valley with their two teenage daughters, have a business selling what Kaimal calls “speed scratch” sauces, dal, chana and rice in more than 10,000 stores, including Target13. employ people. , Costco and Whole Foods.
“A lot has changed since I wrote my first book in 1996,” she says. “People are much more savvy now about spices and how to use them.”
Its cookbook, Curried Favors, was written as an introduction to Indian cooking at a time when ingredients were much more difficult to find. Her second book, Taste the Spice Coast of India, published in 2000, focused on the cuisine of Kerala, where her father was born.
Now, in his third book, the author-entrepreneur says that by stocking up on the right ingredients (many of which have long shelf lives), you can “make Indian flavors easy and delicious to incorporate into your meals.” It can be done,” he claims.
“I’ve considered what a dinner at an American table looks like,” she said. “I have a family to feed. I run a business.
Her Red Chili Shrimp recipe has a long ingredient list of dry rubs, sauces, tadka, and more, and is an example of how no matter how intimidating the recipe may seem, it’s ready in about 30 minutes. She wants home cooks interested in Indian flavors and techniques to try these dishes and discover how easy they are to make.
“We hope that it will bring in people who are on the brink of being interested in India but still frightened by it.”
She divides the essential spice blends of takka and masala into mini-recipes within recipes and explains how to roll them out. She explains that tadka (infused oil) can be made at the beginning of cooking a dish or used to add flavor and finish a recipe. She provides recipes for masalas (dry or wet spice pastes that can use a few to dozens of ingredients) and teaches how to use masalas to layer flavors in different ways.
Once the home cook gathers the ingredients and understands these two concepts, he can apply the “Indian style” to almost any meal.
She credits her father, Chandran Kaimal, with laying the groundwork for her Indian cuisine, which led to her career in the food industry. Her mother, Lorraine, from New England, cooked during the week, but on weekends, her father, a physicist, would be in the kitchen and take great care as she cooked.
“I had to be able to replicate things like an experiment,” she says. “He paid close attention to flavor and struck the right balance. We were eating his experiments every weekend.”
Kaimal, who grew up in Boston and then Boulder, Colorado, cooked from a binder of recipes that his father typed in from college to when he started his catering business. These recipes helped secure her first cookbook publisher, she said.
They also gave me comfort after my father died in 2021 and my mother in 2022.
“That way we can keep them alive and in our minds,” she said. That’s why she even weaves her father’s non-Indian recipes into her cookbooks, such as the Southeast Asian dish “Tanjimi Goreng,” which is noodles stir-fried with vegetables, eggs, and a light soy sauce and vinegar sauce.
Get the recipe: Tangy mee goreng
Her brother Narayan Kaimal found an index card from the 1970s with her father’s neat handwritten recipes. When Kaimal’s father was young, her parents lived in Kuala Lumpur, Malaya (currently Malaysia), where her mother made this dish for Kaimal. Kaimal’s favorite.
“While not exactly Indian, this is a true ode to my father,” she said. “I remember watching him fry the eggs that thin omelet way. did.”
Kaimal says that whatever she was cooking, her father was “devout” to undergo a final taste test before serving. She remembers letting him taste a spoonful from the pot to “see if he needed anything.”
His obsession with nuances of flavor and the influence of his proven cooking techniques are his legacy to her, and she wants to share it with others.
Get the recipe: red chili shrimp