Indian Cooking
Indian cooking offers variety of dishes in both, vegetarian as well as non vegetarian and is one of the leading cuisines in the world. Most of the Indian cuisines are prepared with commonly available ingredients and simple cooking methods. No other cuisine in the world offers so many varieties of delicious dishes as Indian cooking. As India is a diverse country with hundreds of languages, thousands of dialects, each region, each state and even each town offers their own recipes.
Indian curries and tandoori items are as famous as color television and cell phones. You can find these items at any part of the world whether it is remote Siberia or ever frozen Antarctica. Likewise, even the Eskimos like south Indian Idlies and Dosas along with sambar and chatni. Contrary to popular beliefs that Indians are good only in vegetarian dishes, meat preparations such as Butter Chicken, Dum Biriyani, Rogan Gosh, and Bengal Fish Curry are very much liked by people from different continents.
In India, cooking is considered to be a basic art and mothers teach cooking to their daughters in a systematic way at their earlier ages. Unlike west, packaged food culture is not yet arrived in India. Majority of the Indian people follow cook and eat culture, they prepare food for each time. Many families prepare fresh food items for all three times breakfast, lunch and dinner. For some section of religious inclined people consuming previous day’s food is a taboo. However, this culture is slowly changing; people have started looking for packaged cooked food. Especially, in cities where both the couples go for job opt for ready made food or eating out due to time constraint.
As India is a diverse culture their food habits and recipes also differ from region to region. Indian cooking can be classified broadly into four major categories like South Indian Cooking, North Indian Cooking, East Indian Cooking and Mughlai Cooking. These cuisine categories include both vegetarian and non vegetarian. Apart from these main classifications there are innumerable sub categories. Different external aggressors who invaded India in various time span of Indian history left their legacy in Indian cooking. Mughlai provided their own varieties of dishes; British and Persians left their own cuisines.
If you take south Indian dishes there are Chettinad Dishes, Malabar Dishes, Konkan Dishes, and Andhra Dishes. They use different ingredients and cooking methods. Andhra dishes are very spicy where as Konkans add little sweetness in most of their food items. Coconut is widely used in most of the Malabar dishes, and Chettinad dishes are known for their spicy gravies both in vegetarian and non-vegetarian. In south Indian cuisine rice is the main ingredient. There are different kinds of rice dishes like Idly, Dossa, Adai, Appam, Idiyappam in which rice is the main ingredient.
There are different North Indian cooking varieties. Punjabi dishes are not only popular in India but also liked very much by western and eastern countries. Who will forget Punjabi items like crispy Aloo Paratha and delicious Dhum Biryani?
Unlike western dishes Indian cooking does not require sophisticated kitchen appliances or expensive cooking aids. A gas stove and some simple utensils are sufficient to prepare a delicious Indian dish.