The men and women who brought curry to Birmingham
bbc.co.uk
bbc.co.uk
Chef John/Seriouseats et al. I feel are not so great when it comes to this cuisine, unfortunately I cannot find anything better. Grateful for any tips on getting a good CTM!
Sanjeev Kapoor has been a famous Indian celebrity chef for a long time: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCmoX4QULJ9MB00xW4coMiOw
And then there are several village-style cooking channels that are just fun to watch:
She's been around for at least a decade and is reliable.
The science is simple: water vaporizes at 212F/100C at atmospheric pressure. But if you increase the pressure, the boiling point increases [1]. This means instead of cooking temperatures maxing out at 212F, the cooker lets one achieve higher temperatures. This is why pressure cookers are able to cook faster -- the temperatures are simply higher.
Meats cooked with pressure cookers tend to come out more tender (if you don't let them dry out) in a shorter amount of time.
[1] Water phase diagram. Notice that on the vaporization-condensation part of the curve, when P increases, the T crossover point also increases https://courses.lumenlearning.com/suny-chem-atoms-first/chap...
I have a feeling that the recent popularity of the InstaPot will make pressure cookers much more popular in years to come.
Those guys somehow managed to figure out how to sell boatloads of pressure cookers to Americans when so many before them have tried and failed.
I only use quick release for delicate foods like steamed vegetables.
(the principle is the same for non-electronic pressure cookers; quick-release there simply means running cold water on the pot with the lid closed to depressurize)
[1] https://www.pressurecookingtoday.com/quick-pressure-release-...
The science, it seems, is not quite as simple as you think:
Cooking is the result of heat transfer. When you raise the vaporization temperature (by raising the pressure), more heat is transferred in the process of getting to that temperature and vaporizing the steam.
To verify this, we can do an enthalpy calculation. Specific enthalpy (h) for water at 25C, 1 atm is 104920 J/kg. At 1 atm, the enthalpy for gaseous steam at vaporization is 2.676e6 J/kg. For pressure cookers, at 2 atm, the enthalpy is 2.707e5 J/kg. That is an extra 31000 J/kg.
I believe the marketing term for this in much of the world is _mutton_
Currying food may be a style but not in any way indicative of a particular dish.
Curry might be one of originally appropriated/invented terms not too unlike Yoga and Chai.
I read a funny article a few years ago about British Indian people going to India for the first time to visit relatives and really looking forward to the amazing currys they would be able to get out there (surely better than the knockoffs we get here??).
They were very disappointed to discover what British people call "an Indian" is nothing like the food Indian people eat.
In the UK when we hear Balti, it literally means bucket.
American or European (or Indian or Thai) style Chinese food is just another regional variant, of which there are many in China.
It’s important to remember that when people talk about ”Indian food” in the western world, we usually mean the British adopted version, not the authentic stuff.
Similar to how many use the term ”mexican food” when they talk about the food more properly named “Tex-Mex”
Perhaps there should be a Tex-Mex type term for UK-style Indian/Pakistani/Bangladeshi dishes that isn’t just “Curries” or “Indian”.
That seems to be the contention of Brits, at least, though it's a claim fraught with much contention.
Many of the early Indian immigrants to the US were Punjabi and so it is the dishes or variations of Punjabi cuisine that are considered icons of "Indian food" in the US.
With subsequent waves of immigration from Kerala and other regions of India and growing pressure to differentiate many more regionally-focused places have sprung up in the US, at least for the general public.
A Chettinad restaurant recently opened near me, though I've yet to try it.
Given the history, the obvious name may also be… contentious: “Empire food”
Western settlers were unable to pronounce the 'dh' correctly, so they ended up calling it curry. Also, kadhi is a very specific dish in North and South India, but outside of India, it's become the general term for anything with a spicy sauce.
AFAIK, kadhi is the Marathi and Hindi word for a specific dish, made mainly of heated buttermilk with spices in it, eaten with rice and other things, or had as a drink. So what you say seems unlikely to be the origin of the bigger umbrella term curry as used in English in the West (and also some in India, where we informally say we had aloo curry or cabbage curry or whatever curry for lunch or dinner).
See:
See what I did there? :)