Indian Accent goes gourmet by the book

A new book by chef Manish Mehrotra hopes to document Indian cuisine and take it to global audiences

"I never thought that writing a book would be a hundred times more difficult than cooking a dish,” laughs Manish Mehrotra on the phone from New York, as he gets set to bring Indian Accent to the Big Apple by the end of February.  “Writing a recipe for a book is a nightmare, especially for professional chefs. A lot of things that you take for granted and as obvious may not be so for the layman reading your book.”

Many recipes that Mehrotra does at his restaurant are complicated, involving diverse elements and minute detailing. “It’s not like you cook chicken, put it in a curry and it’s done,” he says. So, he ended up spending nearly three years selecting suitable recipes from the Indian Accent’s vast culinary repertoire that readers could recreate in their kitchen. Seventy-four such dishes form part of his book, The Indian Accent Restaurant Cookbook, which he recently launched at the Jaipur Literature Festival. To simplify things further, he has included recipes that can use elements from one another.

Potato sphere

Each recipe is accompanied by stunning food shots, styled by Mehrotra and photographed by Rohit Chawla. There are also interesting nuggets about each dish, ranging from personal anecdotes to how it came to be invented at the Indian Accent kitchen. For instance, Mehrotra writes that the signature Tuna bhel ceviche, lime cream and crushed kurkure recipe is an ode to his eight-year-old daughter’s crazy love for Kurkure. “One evening, as she and I were watching the reality show, Deadliest Catch, on television, sharing a packet of Kurkure, I was inspired to think of combining this spicy, crispy snack with fish,” he writes.

A lot of the signature recipes mentioned in the book stem from Mehrotra’s childhood experiences and also trace the evolution of the menu at the Indian Accent, which was the only restaurant from India in the S Pellegrino list of 100 Best Restaurants in the World 2015. Take, for instance, the Chicken tikka quesadilla, pink peppercorn raita, which was not on the original Indian Accent menu. “I created it for the children who accompanied their parents to the restaurant, as the kids wanted a less spicy, easy-to-eat dish. It became so popular that I included it in the menu a few years later,” writes Mehrotra in the book, which has been published by Penguin Viking and will be available in the stores February 10 onwards, priced at Rs3,499.

So, what prompted Mehrotra and the Old World Hospitality team, which owns the restaurant, to launch the book now? “When we launched the Indian Accent in 2009, we were doing something different — taking Indian cuisine out of the butter-chicken circle. So, we wanted to document that. The sad thing is that even now there is very little sharing of knowledge and documentation,” says Mehrotra, who feels that Indian cuisine lags way behind the French and Italian ones when it comes to being documented properly. “If you leave cities like New York and London, no one knows of Rajasthani, south Indian, Bengali and Gujarati fare, or that we have such a vast vegetarian repertoire. The time has come to tell the world of this culinary diversity.”

Butter baked scallops, saffron cream cauliflower, sago crisp

Credited with being one of the pioneers of, what is now called contemporary Indian cuisine, Mehrotra worked with pork ribs and foie gras at a time when no one had even thought of putting them on the menu. His recipes of Red snapper moilee, Besan laddoo tart, Potato sphere chaat and Pulled kathal phulka taco have been copied almost everywhere.

“Now everyone does a taco — be it parantha taco or thepla taco. I have even seen it served exactly the way we do, within a wooden frame,” he says. A lot of these recipes find their way in the book, giving the reader an opportunity to learn straight from the master chef himself. “There are different types of contemporary Indian cuisines. Each of the chefs playing with this genre is doing it differently. But somewhere all these practices are rooted in what Mehrotra started at the Indian Accent,” says Rushina Munshaw Ghildiyal, Mumbai-based food writer, author and owner of the state-of-the-art kitchen studio, A Perfect Bite. An ardent food book collector, she has already pre-ordered the book and hopes to keep it as a souvenir. “I don’t know how much I will cook from it. There are some things that are best had at a restaurant and can’t be made at home. But his book is very exciting for me as a collector,” she says.

Wasabi and cucumber raita , pomegranate and avocado raita , pink peppercorn raita

Recipe:

Potato sphere chaat, white peas ragda  

Ingredients:

For potato spheres (4): Russet potatoes or white potatoes 200 gms; oil for frying

For white peas ragda: Dry white peas 50 gms; onions, chopped, 1 tbsp, tomatoes, chopped; green chillies, chopped 1/2 tsp; fresh coriander leaves 1 tsp; lime juice 1 tsp; chaat masala 1/2 tsp

To serve: Sweet yogurt 2 tbsp; green chutney 2 tsp; tamarind chutney 1 1/2 tbsp; chaat masala a pinch; sliced watermelon as garnish; cress, or pea shoots as garnish (optional)

Method:

Soak the white peas for at least three hours in water.  

Make white peas ragda: Place the soaked peas in a saucepan. Add water. Boil for 20–30 minutes, or till the peas turn almost completely mushy. Drain excess water, if any. Add onions, tomatoes, green chillies, coriander, lime juice and chaat masala to the boiled peas. Mix well. Adjust seasoning to taste.

Make potato spheres: We use potatoes with low sugar content so that the spheres do not darken when fried. Grate the potatoes, neither too fine nor too thick. Remove excess water by pressing between paper towels. Fill individual, round, fine-mesh moulds with the grated potatoes. Heat oil, place the moulds in the oil and deep fry till each sphere is golden brown and turns crisp. You can fry the potato spheres in a deep-fat fryer too.

Serve: Place the mashed, spiced peas in a single line on a long platter. Place the crisp potato spheres on top. Press the spheres lightly into the mushy peas so that they hold when the platter is carried. Pour yogurt, green chutney and tamarind chutney on top. Sprinkle chaat masala. Garnish with cress, or pea shoots and a small slice of watermelon. The watermelon helps wash down the palate.