Opos cookbook 5 minute magic pdf free download

Remember that the meats and rice need to be perfectly cooked, layered and the rice grains should not stick to each other. As long as you follow this, you can experiment with a variety of bases, flavouring techniques and additives and will end up with lip smacking biriyanis everytime! Marination : The process of soaking the meat in a tenderizing paste is common to North Indian biriyanis. Usually yogurt is mixed with ginger- garlic paste, spice powders and the meat is coated with this mixture and rested for 1 — 2 hours.

A variety of tenderising agents like raw papaya paste, lemon juice etc may be added. Though meat is usually marinated for hours, some regions follow.

South Indian Biryanis do not use marinated meats. Experiment with a variety of bases, flavouring techniques and additives to create never before cooked Biryanis! Cook on high for 1Wh 3min. Note time and shut off just before foaming starts. Cook on high for 5Wh 6min.

Mash tomato. Mix all. Cook stuffed eggplant into a sour stew. T IPS : Prefer egg sized brinjals. Slit slowly from top so that it stays attached at the bottom. Ensure onions cover the cooker base to avoid burning. It is surprising how cuisines across vast distances have paired eggplant with an overload of oil. Stuffed brinjal appears in many avatars in south Indian cuisine.

The theme is similar across cuisines. Eggplant is slit, stuffed with a spicy mixture and cooked in a tangy gravy. In the OPOS version, we use the No water cooking, layering, use of whole tomatoes and co ntrolled caramelisation techniques to convert this laborious recipe into a single step.

This is how it works : On heating, the layered onions start caramelising, soon the whole tomatoes roast and start leaking juices. This leads to steam buildup. This stops caramelisation and prevents burning. The steam saturated atmosphere cooks everything in their own juices without the need. On opening, the eggplants are removed and the rest can be mashed to become the gravy base. You can use the same logic to cook up many onion - tomato based curries!

Replace sambar powder with garam masala, sesame oil with a neutral oil, tamarind with amchoor and it becomes north Indian. Replace sambar powder with coconut- chili paste, sesame oil with coconut oil, tamarind with raw mango and it becomes a Keralite recipe. Replace sambar powder with zatar, sesame oil with olive oil, tamarind with sumac and this becomes an Arab theme.

Eggplant is loved across the world and you can easily cook up your own variants to fit any cuisine! Cook on high for 2Wh 3min. Release pressure immediately. Transfer to another vessel to stop cooking. T IPS Do not release pressure if you want a mushier consistency. Chop finer if you want a grilled layer. It comes from the Vegetarian Kerala Brahmin cuisine.

Christians fleeing persecution in Syria landed in Kerala in the first century. Their cooking styles mingled with the spices of Kerala creating the unique cuisine of the Syrian Christians.

Unlike western cuisine, Syrian Christian curries use coconut oil, mustard seeds, curry leaves, and coconut milk extensively. Arab traders have been trading with Kerala for centuries. Some stayed back, married local women and became Mappillai Son-in- law , or Moplah Muslims. Their cuisine has more in common with Arab cuisine than with South Indian or Mogul cuisine.

Unlike Mogul curries, the moplah curries do not use rich ingredients but rely heavily on spices of the south like coriander powder, chili powder, turmeric and cumin. Like Syrian Christian cuisine, it uses meat extensively. Unlike other south Indian states, tamarind or lentils play only a marginal role. Coconut meat, coconut milk, and coconut oil are combined with chili, cumin and yogurt to create a variety of lightly spiced, easy to prepare curries.

It is in Kerala we see black pepper jostling chili aside in many curries. Unlike the rest of south India, tamarind, cilantro or tomato are not extensively used. Use of raw coconut oil as a garnish, use of Jackfruit seeds and baby jackfruit as vegetables are unique to Kerala curries. All these curries are eaten with hot cooked rice. Unlike the thin, white rice eaten in other South Indian states, fat grained, red rice is preferred in Kerala.

It is the simplest curry of them all. Drizzle with ghee, mix with hot rice and dig in! Parippu is normally spiced up with a variety of elaborate flavourings. Olan is a chunky curry made from coconut milk and flavoured with coconut oil. Boil vegetables, add coconut milk and coconut oil and presto! Olan is ready. Though a variety of vegetables can be used in this lightly spiced curry, ash gourd and black eyed beans are the favourites. Roast grated coconut, mix in tamarind water and sambar powder, add boiled veggies and pulingari is ready.

This is very similar to a Tamil kulambu, but for the addition of coconuts. Instead of Sambar powder, if a masala made from roast and ground tuvar dal, Bengal gram, dhania, red chili, asafetida, fenugreek and coconut is added to Pulingari, we get a variant called Podi pudicha pulingari. Some versions of Pulingari have boiled and mashed tuvar dal mixed in, thus making it almost a sambar. Pulingari can be thickened by adding a couple of pinches of rice flour mixed with water.

Take a handful of grated coconut, a couple of pinches of cumin and a green chili. Blend to a smooth paste , mix in boiled vegetables and Pulissery is ready. Various versions of this curry exist, but all have coconut- cumin- yogurt paste at their base. Though coconut and cumin paste forms the base for all Eiisserys, various versions exist in which turmeric powder, green chili, garlic, shallots etc are blended along with coconut- cumin.

In some versions, chili is replaced by black pepper. Erisseries are normally garnished with grated and roasted coconut. Blend grated coconut to a paste with cumin, black pepper and a little water. Add yogurt and mix in a boiled vegetable and Kaalan is ready.

Kalan is very similar to Aviyal, but usually has a single vegetable in it instead of the medley that Aviyal uses. Unlike the Aviyal, Kalan uses black pepper and not chili. Aviyal is a thick curry made from coconut- cumin — chili - yogurt paste.

Blend coconut, chili and cumin to a paste, mix in yogurt. This is easily the most popular Kerala curry. Blend with a green chili and optionally a garlic clove to a coarse paste. Mix with boiled vegetables and Thoran is ready. Though any vegetable or combination of veggies can be used, Thorans made from Green papaya or long string beans payar are signature dishes of Kerala.

Variations call for different seasonings like fried mustard, lentils etc,. The Mole comes all the way from Mexico, with the Portuguese and is a signature dish, being cooked with fish into the Meen Mole.

Use of raw coconut oil as a garnish, use of jackfruit seeds and baby jackfruit in curries are unique to Kerala. In a PC, add g white, unsalted butter. Cook on high for 25 whistles 8 min. Optionally, cook longer to get the colour you need. Let set. Heat butter to evaporate water T IPS The browner the ghee, the longer it lasts If your ghee is very pale, keep refrigerated and consume fast Can also cook over medium heat for 20 min. Small globules of fat are suspended in milk naturally.

If fresh milk is chilled, these fat globules congeal and rise to the top as cream. This cream is mostly butter and just requires a brief churning to turn it into butter. Countries like US use fresh cream to extract butter sweet cream butter. In Europe, cream is left to ferment and then used to extract a more flavourful butter cultured butter. India follows a similar process but sours the milk into yogurt and churns the yogurt to remove butter. In some households, the top layer after boiling milk is removed, botttled and after enough cream has accumulated, shaken well to make butter.

But butter does not store well. So Indian cuisine invented the process of clarifying and condensing it into ghee, embracing it wholeheartedly. Fat lasts long but the water and milk solids speed up spoilage. In making ghee, this water is evaporated and the other milk solids are burnt and filtered out.

This turns butter into pure fat, with a very long shelf life. Milk has been condensed twentyfold into the long lasting ghee. Indian cuisine prefers ghee made from cow's milk. But the milk of any mammal can be turned into ghee by the same process.

The longer ghee is heated, the more it caramelizes. The colour of ghee varies with the amount of heating, ranging from pale yellow to nutty brown. Surprisingly, Indian cuisine never bothered to flavour ghee with spices - a common practice in many Mid east and African cuisines. Down south, the leaves of drumstick are fried in ghee. You can use any spice of your choice to create a range of flavoured ghee.

Traditionally, butter is melted in an open pot and patiently stirred once a while till it becomes ghee. But this process calls for a skilled eye and lacks consistency. Cooking fat in an open pan also causes grime to accumulate all around it. The closed cooking eliminates this. The water content in butter is sufficient to build up pressure inside a cooker.

The timing is adjusted so that cooking stops just when most of the water is evaporated. You can play around with the timing to get the ghee exactly to your liking. The sediments filtered out are perfectly edible.

They can be eaten mixed with sugar into a dessert. In a PC, add 4tsp oil, water , eggplants. Cook on high for 4Wh 5 min. T IPS : Use egg sized brinjals. Cook on high for 2Wh 7 min. Blend to a paste. Cook on high for 1Wh 4min. Stirfry in open vessel for a crunchy shell. Can add onions as a bottom layer if you face burning. Ensure dry powders do not touch the bottom of the PC. Only that they are not cut into wedges, but into bite sized chunks.

Kaara kari can be paired with any rice and curry. However, certain combinations are much loved. When served with any of the following, it gets elevated to comfort food! Vegetable: Remember this is a shallow fry. So any non-watery starchy vegetable can be used, though potato is the most common.

Other root vegetables like colocasia can be used if peeled and cut into big chunks. Raw banana, sweet potato, yam and other tubers can all be used. Spices : Chili powder is mandatory. Other spices can be varied as per your personal choice. Gram flour has been added here to absorb excess water and. It also adds a bit of protein to this starchy curry. In spite of the name, the curry is not usually too spicy - just appears so because of shallow frying.

Oil: In open pan cooking, you are restricted to oils with a high smoke point. But because of the sealed cooking and steam saturation, you can use any oil of your choice. Ensure the cut size is not too large or not too small.

If too small, the vegetable will not hold its shape and turn to mush. Bite sized pieces are ideal. Though not needed, you can gently shake your cooker halfway during cooking, to redistribute the vegetables and prevent burning. Indian stir fried cottage cheese. Cook on high for 2Wh 4 min. It is used across Indian cuisines for a variety of stir fries.

Kadai Paneer is a very popular restaurant dish and is usually stir fried with a medley of brightly coloured vegetables. The dish is defined by the cooked yet crunchy bites of vegetables. In the traditional method, oil is heated and spices are fried. Usually a bit of water is added to prevent burning. Both dry and gravy versions are common. This protein rich dish is usually paired with a carb to make it a full meal. We simulate stir frying with flash cooking to cut down the multi step, supervised cooking into OPOS.

We cook on high heat to fill up the PC with steam as fast as possible. After the PC fills with steam in the first one minute or so, burning is prevented by the steam which maintains the temperature at around degrees, not sufficient for food to burn.

The steam also cooks the food evenly, eliminating the need to stir or fry. At the end of the cooking process, the steam is released to prevent over cooking of vegetables. Use crunchy vegetables.

Make and serve fresh. Some paneer varieties can become tough on cooling, especially if cut into small chunks. Marinated meats might take longer to cook depending on the meat used, marination time and the size of the pieces. Minced meat cooks the fastest. Skewer paneer- capsicum- tomato on a toothpick and serve as mini bites. Cook on high for 2Wh 3 min.

Cooked pasta was served with basic roux flour and milk based sauce , when one did not have fresh vegetables at hand. Later cheese was added to this roux, to make a cheese sauce. When mixed with macaroni, the Mac and Cheese was born! The traditional method calls for the preparation of roux, boiling and draining pasta and simmering all together with cheese. In OPOS, we cook pasta by the absorption method, like rice. The absorption method is endorsed by many chefs, who cook pasta in an open pot, with a measured quantity of water.

We use the same technique here, but in a pressure cooker. Our goal is not just to cook the pasta but to make a complete meal in one step. This means that the sauce needs to be made automatically as the pasta cooks. We do this by balancing the volume of cooking liquid so that it not only cooks the pasta but absorbs the starch from the pasta to create a thick sauce.

After cooking, grated cheese is mixed in, which melts in the heat and makes the pasta extra creamy. Very thin or very delicate pastas would turn to a mush. Use only pastas whose shell thickness matches a macaroni. If your pasta overcooks in a whistle, try the quick release by lifting the weight to let the steam out. Indian pastas cook perfectly in one or two whistles. Italian pastas take a bit more time.

You can either let them soak in the liquid for a few minutes before cooking or cook them longer. When you open the cooker the pasta will look all squished up and the sauce will look clumpy. Don't worry. Just mix well and it would be fine! Shape into lemon sized balls. Cook on high heat for 2Wh 5 min. Mild, creamy and rich, it has staked out its place in most restaurant menus.

The theme is simple - cook dumplings in a mildly spiced base. But there are numerous contradictory rules surrounding this theme. Garam masala should be avoided and replaced with fried whole spices, which should then be filtered out. Chefs take elaborate precautions to ensure these rules are not broken, but none of them define this theme. As long as the gravy is mildly spiced, rich and creamy and is cooked with koftas, the dish will fit into this theme.

Most traditional recipes are elaborate and laborious. We use flash cooking, layering and controlled caramelisation techniques to cook the curry at one shot. If you desire a very smooth gravy, you can use a regular mixie for blending the gravy. This prevents caramelisation.

Crumbled paneer is less fluffy and will become tough on cooking. In a PC, add 1C sugar, 3tsp ghee, 1C water, 1. Cook on high for 1Wh 6 min. Let cool. Roast again till it does not taste raw.

Mango Kesari becomes Aam Ka Sheera. This popular sweet takes skill to prepare the traditional way. Plain kesari was hacked months back by extending the autolysis principle to grits.

The core idea is to use a measured quantity of water which will both cook the grits by retained heat, at the same time be completely absorbed in the process.

This eliminates all stirring and lumping, making the process hassle free. The key is to use grits that are already edible. Here we use double roasted rava readily available in the market , which is almost cooked and is edible raw.

It just requires a brief soak in hot water to get fully cooked. If you are unable to find them, you need to roast rava over low heat till it loses its raw taste. Almost any processed, ready to eat cereal can be used in place of rava - pressed rice flakes, quick cooking oats etc can all be used.

If the fruit used is mildly sour, you need to add more sugar to balance the sourness. Sugar is the most popular sweetener. This recipe uses water as the base liquid. In the mango version, the golden glow comes from mangoes themselves.

In this version, ghee can be skipped completely, if you so prefer. Khoya: As this is seen as a halwa in north India, it is common to mix in milk solids khoya. This adds an interesting texture to the kesari. Stir and cook in an open pan if you want a drier version. Mould it as you like. Cook on high for 4 whistles 7 mins. Blend all. T IPS 1. Prefer small tomatoes.

If big, scoop out seeds. The Methi Muttar Malai is a winter delicacy as winter brings in the richest cream , freshest green peas and greenest methi. As with all OPOS recipes, we don't aim to pump in taste by long laborious cooking and by the use of spices and fat.

Instead we just cook this rich bounty just enough and let nature speak for itself. Cook on high for 5 Wh 3 min 25 sec. Pour in a greased container and cut into squares. T IPS : Vary cooking time to vary consistency. The consistency varies from a porous crumble to a soft fudge.

Legend has it that it was created in the royal kitchens of the Mysore Maharaja. In the conventional method, sugar is melted to a syrup and the roasted gram flour is mixed in. The whole mass is stirred carefully under expert supervision till the right consistency is reached. The 'right consistency' can only be judged by expert cooks as a few seconds this way or that way changes the texture. In OPOS, we use the sugar syrup hack and autolysis to deskill the process and condense it to a single step.

OPOSing also makes the process consistent and scalable, making possible large scale preparation painless. Large scale preparation of Mysorepak the conventional way is a back breaking process and is not even attempted by home cooks.

With OPOS, the amount of mysorepak you can prepare is limited only by the size of the cooker you have. Roasted gram flour is then stirred in and left to cook and cool in the residual heat. Rice flour, wheat flour, nut flour, millet flour, coconut flour, malted flours can all be used. The consistency of the fudge varies from flour to flour and you need to fine tune the cooking time based on the flour used.

Remember the flour does not have time to be cooked completely in residual heat. So they must be well roasted to ensure they are mostly cooked before they enter the syrup. Roasting can be dry, with oil or with ghee. It is just to ensure the flour is cooked. Raw gram flour can be replaced by fresh ground roasted gram flour Pottu kadalai maavu. Raw gram flour is made by powdering raw channa dal.

Roasted gram. It does not need further roasting. Sieving using a sieve to sift the flour aerates the flour and breaks up clumps, thus ensuring a better texture. Sugar serves as a binder and a sweetener. It can be replaced with jaggery with marginal change in timings. The longer you cook sugar syrup, the firmer it becomes. Even a few seconds can change the consistency of your syrup.

Please use standard equipment, heat settings and timings to perfectly recreate the recipe. Else you need to tweak it based on the equipment you have. Ghee is responsible for the creamy mouth feel and flavour. Ghee is optional, though many versions call for ghee that is thrice the amount of gramflour, making this not a gram flour fudge, but a ghee fudge!

Each liquid subtly varies the flavour of the fudge. You can. Leavening is needed if you desire a porous texture. It can be done by creaming gram flour with sugar and ghee which mixes in air bubbles or by using baking powder or by vigorously mixing the mix, to aerate it. The PC needs to be washed immediately after cooking. If you let it dry, the syrup solidifies and makes cleaning tough. Cook on high for 3Wh 5 Min.

Mash all. India was never comfortable with yeast, which is why cheese, wine or leavened bread is still not a part of our cuisine. It entered our cuisine as the Pav and we treated it as a roti, pairing it with our curry, the Bhaji. The Bhaji gradually morphed, from a simple curry to a buttery veggie mash especially designed for the Pav. It took its final shape in Mumbai a short hop from the epicenter of the Portuguese rule , where Pav Bhaji is still one of the most widely consumed street foods.

All Indian unleavened breads need to be eaten fresh. But making fresh breads to a crowd is a tough job. So, it is likely that the Indian flatbread was replaced by the Pav by street food vendors, to cater to mill workers in Mumbai, who had a very short break for lunch.

Huge quantities of Bhaji could be prepared ahead of time and served with the Pav instantly. It is this crucial difference which made it such a hit.

The Pav has a shelf life of over a week, unlike an Indian flatbread which is best consumed within minutes. The Pav Bhaji was eagerly adopted first by the roti- eating belt, with each region introducing its own masalas to flavour the curry.

Gujarat innovated the. There are infinite versions of the Bhaji, cooked to suit local tastes. It supports them all. But the core building blocks remain unchanged. They are all garnished by chopped cilantro, chopped onions and a lemon wedge.

These remain common across the country. Various versions of the Bhaji are popular. Indian cinemas depicting heroes as Pav Bhaji vendors added to the lure of the dish. A medley of boiled veggies are added next with spice powders. All of them are mashed and cooked together. This hack eliminates these steps and makes possible a flavourful, fool proof bhaji to serve four in under 10 mins. The grated tomatoes give it a brilliant red colour and this version tastes good even without any added fat, though butter makes it sinfully delicious!

Shape into small balls. Cook on medium for 1Wh 8 min. Blend all but balls with 1C yogurt. The pure vegetarian Cauvery delta Brahmin cuisine of central Tamilnadu uses just the basic spices. Mutton, chicken and freshwater fish is occasionally used The non-vegetarian Chettinad trader cuisine of Karaikudi liberally uses meat and exotic spices like marathi mokku dried flower pods , anasipoo star anise and kalpasi dried lichens.

Though mutton and chicken are extensively used in Tamil Muslim cuisine, in deference to Hindu beliefs, beef is usually avoided. Kulambu is a sour stew, usually cooked with tamarind. It is a very simple stew and need not even be cooked, though it is normally briefly heated. Konkani Tambli is a version of uncooked More Kulambu. Though not traditional, a variety of fermented milk products from across the world Kefir, Viili , Kaymak, sour cream etc or other yogurts goat, mare, camel can also be used to cook up never before cooked, exotic more kulambu.

A variety of fried spices like mustard, curry leaves, fenugreek, red chili, asafetida are used for additional flavouring. Here, it is replaced with bottled tadka. Like the Kadi, More kulambu tastes great when cooked with pre cooked stuff boiled lentil balls — paruppu urundai, pakodi or even torn papad. This hack uses. Chicken, pepper and most of the spices that go into this theme originated in India. It is more prevalent in the south, the land of pepper, and uses south Indian spices turmeric powder, curry leaves, pepper etc.

Each region inserts its favourite oils, spices and additives into this theme, creating its own variants. Tamilnadu prefers sesame oil and its most famous version, the Chettinad pepper chicken uses Kalpasi dried lichens and fennel. Kerala uses coconut oil and mixes in grated coconut. Andhra uses peanut oil in cooking up this theme. This hack caramelizes onions by using the no water technique.

By this time, the steam generated builds up pressure and ensures chicken gets cooked very fast. The absence of water also concentrates flavours and makes possible a thick gravy. Chicken releases water on cooking and no added liquid is essential. The same theme can be extended with different meats. While using dry meats like mutton, a minimal amount of liquid needs to be added to build up steam. This theme can be extended with a variety of meats.

Both gravy and dry versions exist. A tadka with any combination of mustard, curry leaves, dry red chilies, onions, garlic can be used for an extra flavour punch.

This recipe gives you an almost dry curry. It can be converted to a full dry curry by stir frying it in an open pan. Ensure rice is completely covered with herbs. T IPS Can add garlic, onion for more flavour Mix in 2 tsp vinegar if tomatoes are not sour Cook longer for a thicker consistency. Cook on high for 3Wh 5 min. A dash of sugar is usually added for a hint of sweetness. The onion ratio has been balanced to give the soup a body, without the need of flour.

After cooking the soup is thickened both by the onion paste and by the emulsification when the ingredients are blended with butter. This produces a rich and creamy mouth feel without the starchy taste. But croutons, grated cheese, toasted nuts, sour cream, flavoured oil,etc can be used. The fresher and riper the tomatoes, the better the soup. Use your choice of flavouring agents and explore variants of this classic theme.

Cook on high for 1Wh 5 min. All cultures boil their favorite cereal grits in a liquid into a porridge. Every single grain can be and is cooked into a porridge. Cooking grits is faster than cooking whole grains as grits have a larger surface area. All our breakfast cereals are actually instant porridges where the cereals are precooked and just need a brief soak to become edible.

In India, a huge range of porridges are cooked as upmas in the south and kichidis in the north. In their most basic version, they are just flavoured cereal grits. But they can support a range of additives. In north India the savoury version is usually made from millet grits, especially Bajra Pearl millet. With wheat grits, the sweet version called Sooji Halwa, is more common. Porridge is one of the oldest foods of mankind they have been found in the stomachs of For much of history fine flour was a luxury as flour making technology was not available.

However, it is easy to coarsely grind a cereal or legume. These grits were then boiled in a liquid. This is a simple, foolproof way to draw nourishment from grains or legumes. So it is no wonder almost all nations have their own versions of Upma made from locally available grains, flavoured by their traditional flavourings.

You will find Oats porridge from steel cut oats or rolled oats in most of Europe and USA cooked with milk and sugar , and maize porridge in Mexico cooked with milk and chocolate. A variety of cornmeal porridges are common in the southern US. Sorghum porridge is common in many African nations.

The famous peas porridge made from pea grits are eaten in England and Scotland. Though I prefer my Uppuma semisolid and that's why the recipe calls for four cups of water for each cup of grits , you can alter the amount of water to make it thicker or mushier. Remember that Uppuma thickens dramatically on cooling. The key problem in cooking grits is clumping. Unless stirred constantly and the proper ratio of water is.

This clumping problem was solved by Chitra Viswanathan's Autolysis hack, which calls for hot roasted rava to be added to boiling water, with no further heating. My hack just tweaks it, changes a couple of steps and the water ratio, to make it fully OPOS.

The key features prized in most gritporridges are 1. The grits should have been fully cooked, but should retain their shape and texture. They should not have been cooked into a mush.

There should be no lumps. Not a single one- however small. The consistency should semi solid and not rock hard when the porridge cold. The OPOS version is especially suitable for making large batches of porridge over 1 kg where stirring is impossible! This hack relies on the fact that the grits are semi cooked by roasting and need only a soak in the boiling water to become fully cooked.

This is the same principle covered in the OPOS kesari hack discussed earlier. Cook on high for 10Wh 8mins. Such a cooking style converts the meat into a semi pickle by greatly reducing water content. Cook on high for 2Wh 5min.

Chili pwdr with our fav spice mix. The word 'Usili' means nothing in Tamil. A likely indicator that this is a borrowed recipe, probably from the Marathi cuisine. The closest equivalent I could find is the Marathi Usal lentil curry. We have already covered the Usili theme earlier, with soaked and spiced lentil grits. This version has two tweaks. It uses a starchy vegetable to convert the protein packed Usili into a balanced meal. The building blocks of this theme are the vegetables used, the starch and the lentil crumble.

All kinds of beans French beans, cluster beans, broad beans,.. Watery vegetables are avoided because they clump up the usili and destroy its prized crumbly, grainy texture.

If your usili does clump up, cook longer in an open pan till excess water evaporates or mix in more crumbled vada. The lentil crumble can be crushed masal vada or even pakoda. The crumble should absord excess water from the vegetable used and give a grainy texture.

The flavouring comes form the south Indian spices and the tadka. The masaal vada, with its own set of spices also flavours the curry. This recipe calls for sambar powder as a flavouring agent. Sambar powder is to south what garam masala is to north. It goes into everything. Sambar powder is usually made from well roasted and ground spices.

In case the roasting has not been proper, you might be able to detect a raw smell in your curry. This can be easily fixed by stir frying the curry in an open pan for a few more minutes. A better option would be to roast your sambar powder over gentle heat till the raw smell disappears.

It can then be used even at the very end, like chat masala. As with most OPOS dishes, tadka is optional or you can mix in bottled tadka while serving. The Usili would look a bit mushy when you open the cooker, because of the starch.

Mix it well, let it cool and it will become nice and crumbly. Play around with the building blocks to create your own versions! In the following pages, you will see soups, starters, curries and main courses, all of which can be served separately or together as a Thali Indian plated meal.

All these consist of small portions of various ingredients served together. A Thali neatly bypasses the elaborate ritualistic serving order inherent in most regional cuisines. It becomes a hassle free, attractive, instant plated meal. It is easy, allowing a. If you are cooking for a party, have the following rules in mind in creating our own Thali.

Step 1. They are the messiest and take the most time. If cooking, check out the starters section. Stick the kadai stuff with toothpicks and pass them around. Bruschetta toasted bread slices topped with anything can be served too. Step 3: Soup, Curries and Dessert These are the easiest. Dessert can be oposed or bought. A bowl of icecream with various syrups and additives which people can assemble themselves would be fun.

In many catering school textbooks, you would find the sentence " The five mother sauces of classical cooking are French cuisine is just years old. They are filled with mother sauces, a fact that the Bible of French cooking, Larousse Gastronomique, does not even bother to acknowledge.

A sauce is just a thickened liquid used as a cooking medium and as a dip for dry foods. A mother sauce acts as a base for numerous other sauces.

Espagnole: Brown Stock thickened with roux. All the sauces above are cooked. Later, Chef Auguste Escoffier adds one more to the list- Hollandaise, which is not cooked like the sauces above, and not thickened with roux.

It can be made by just whisking hot ghee with egg yolks. The list above has been disputed and revised multiple times due to numerous factors. Now, the western chefs classify the mother sauces differently. White Sauces Bechamel, Veloute,.. Indian cuisine has a huge range of mother sauces. Our Makhni, Dopiaza, Dal, Masala are all mother sauces. Using flour as a thickening agent is actually frowned upon in Indian cuisine.

The new generation of western chefs share this view. Instead of using roux, they use reduction long boiling to reduce and thicken the sauce or use non-flour thickeners Cream, butter etc. This is what Indian cuisine has been doing for ages. The curry bases in the next few pages are all actually mother sauces.

It is a pity that the culinary institutes in India still start their syllabus with the French mother sauces, forcing students to go through something they have never experienced in their lives, instead of introducing them to the amazing range of Indian mother sauces they eat every single day! It does not matter what you call them. No one really agrees on the exhaustive list of mother sauces.

If you can use a base recipe to create multiple dishes, you are free to call it a mother sauce. Most OPOS themes are in fact mother sauces! Else use scooped out tomatoes.

But all can also be cook over medium heat for same number of whistles. Cook on high for 4Wh 5 mins. Ghee with your favourite fat 2. GM with your fav spice mixes 3. Mint with your fav herbs. Cook on high for 7 Wh 6 min. Dry red chili with green chilies 2.

GM with your fav spice mix 3. Cook on high for 3Wh 5min. Onions with shallots 2. Tomato with tamarind 3. Coconut with coconut milk 4. GM with your fav spice mix. Cook on high for 2Wh 4min. Ghee with your fav fat 2. Cashew with your fav nuts 3.

Cook on high for 5Wh 4min. Butter with your fav fat 2. Poppy seeds with other seeds 3. Cashew with your fav nuts. Place a live charcoal over an onion slice in the curry.

Add a drop of ghee and seal the pot to infuse a smoked flavour. Cook on high for 5 whistles 6mins. In a PC, layer 4 tsp water, coconut oil , spiced coconut. Cook on high for 2 Wh 4 min. Mix in chopped fruits. Cook on high W for 4 Wh 5 min.

Sesame oil with your favourite oil 3. Sambar powder with your favourite spice mix 5. Cook on high for 4Wh 6 mins. Every single culture boils their favourite edibles with their favourite flavourings into soups of their own. Indian Rasams and Shorbas are nothing but soups. A soup can be thick or thin, clear or viscous, an appetiser or a main course.

It can be served hot or cold, garnished or plain, in sickness or health, during fast or feast. It is the closest we have come to an universal food. The names do not matter much. If there is more liquid, it is a soup. If it has more more solids, it is termed a stew. Clear soups have the ingredients filtered out.

Thick soups have them pureed or use a thickener. Try this elegant theme with variations of your own! All OPOS vegetable soups work the same way - pressure cook the vegetable of your choice and blend it with a liquid. In watery soups, Onion is used to give the soup a body and thickness, thereby omitting the need for using flour to thicken.

Most of these soups are served hot, but they taste equally good when cold, becoming summer soups. Learn one and you've learnt them all. Just use the same technique with any vegetable of your choice to create an array of soups. You never can go wrong!

Cook on high for 3Wh 4 min. Blend with 1C milk. Blend with 2C water. These tough plant cell walls can break down only at higher temperatures, which is easier to achieve in a pressure cooker but takes long hours of simmering in an open pot. This higher temperature inside a cooker can also caramelize the natural sugars in these vegetables without drying them out like stir frying.

The steam saturated environment inside a cooker prevents burning and makes addition of water unnecessary. This makes possible extraction of intense, concentrated juices without dilution. This method is especially ideal for rich stocks.

Some chefs add a pinch of baking soda which makes the mixture alkaline and helps the caramelisation reaction. Once the mixture has been thoroughly cooked and caramelised, it can be pureed with a finishing liquid and served as is as a thick soup or filtered and served as a thin soup.

In open pot versions, the carrots are stir fried till they caramelise. The OPOS. By varying the vegetables, spices, finishing liquid and garnishes, you can create an infinite array of caramelised soups!

Blend all with 1C milk. If you are ready to keep an open mind, the book will really help you be more confident with your cooking. Personally, I felt the book made me more efficient. It is not a replacement for cooking skills and sense.

You still have to prep and plan, if you want to be efficient in the kitchen. The remaining things, a judgement of balance of flavours, combinations and so on, are still very much the key to making good food. They will guide you well if you master OPOS and make you extremely confident in your cooking skills in combination. View 1 comment. Mar 29, A. How to save time while cooking and "anybody can cook". It gives detailed recipes for various dishes that can be done through OPOS cooking method.

It gives precise measurements of items and step by step guide to cooking without losing nutrients. P K rated it it was amazing Oct 06, Rakesh rated it it was amazing Jun 13, Gani Nata rated it really liked it Mar 04, Shez rated it it was amazing Feb 08, Unna Vijay rated it it was amazing Aug 01, Prabhakaran R rated it it was amazing Apr 28, Sitalakshmi V rated it it was amazing Feb 07, Gayathri Swaminathan rated it really liked it Feb 03, Gayathri Krishnamoorthy rated it really liked it Jan 22, Nithya rated it it was amazing Jul 12, Subbarayalu Ramasubbu rated it it was amazing Sep 13, Sushma Praveen rated it it was amazing Apr 06, Dhivya Narayanan rated it it was amazing Apr 19, Bhavana Chethan rated it it was amazing Mar 02, Sameer Tawadia rated it it was amazing Feb 28, Veena Narasimhan rated it really liked it Dec 09, Khushboo P rated it it was amazing Jan 30, Andrea Josephine rated it it was amazing May 21, Sabari Ragav rated it it was amazing Jan 05, Aarthi Ramakrishnan rated it really liked it Nov 20, Sachin Patil rated it it was amazing Oct 08, Sankar Kumar rated it it was amazing Aug 26, There are no discussion topics on this book yet.

Be the first to start one ». Readers also enjoyed. About Ramakrishnan B. Ramakrishnan B.