Non Indian Trying to Make Indian Food

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Look up recipes on Indian websites rather than the first "Indian curries" google shows you.

Use the sauces that come in a jar, like Kitchens of India or Sharwood's, and save yourself a lot of work.

You will probably be attacked by an SJW for cultural appropriation.

As well s/he should be, r4. I couldn't read past the word 'love'. These acts of cultural theft by entitled settler-colonial oppressors and other problematic af people are experienced as assault. It needs to stop and you need to stop centering your own white fragility, OP

R5 You certainly are a product of intenalized colonialism. Perhaps you mean well with your White Saviour narrative (perhaps appropriated from heterosexual white men?). I hope you are aware of the CIS implications of your binary assumptions.

My go-to is the original Time-Life The Cooking Of India from the 1960s. I love the whole series actually.

I have a friend who swears by cookbooks etc. by Madhur Jaffrey

Many sites providing authentic Kerala, Hyderabad, Punjabi, Andhrah, Mumbai, Kolkata, Veg, and Ayurvedic recipes:

Tarladalal.com

Turban Tadka (Youtube)

manjulaskitchen.com

tasty indian recipes.com

vegrecipesofindia.com

vahrehvah.com

indiasnacks.com

bawarchi.com

I look at a lot of cooking channels on Youtube and I like Manjula's Kitchen. It's all vegetarian, though.

What am I supposed to do r5 order take out every night?

Thanks for all the recommendations!

White people shouldn’t cook Indians.

I hope you don’t live in an apartment or condo, OP.

Here you go OP

The links from previous posters are good.

Just a tip -- a mistake people make when preparing Indian food is that they skip the step of lightly frying the spices. It's time consuming. You can skip that step if you want, and you may be satisfied with it, but authentic Indian cooking requires it.

One person cooking an Indian meal can easily become a half-day event. Indians are more communal and often cook together as a way of socializing. If you can make a friend who grew up IN India, I can all but guarantee they would love to have you over while they cook.

As far as prepared Indian food on a budget goes-- if you live near Indian restaurants, then there must be an Indian grocery store in your area; check out their freezer section. Deep brand frozen dinners are good. Most Indian stores carry that brand (among others, but Deep is the best). 'Deep' means light/fire. it's a name brand in India. There's a small oil lamp on their logo. You can get all the Indian classics from that brand, surprisingly high quality for Indian. I'm always surprised the people who recommend Trader Joe's Indian dinners -- they're extraordinarily bland compared to frozen dinners from the Indian stores.

Good luck.

Trader Joe's has 3 very good frozen Indian dinners.

OP!!! Don't get on that plane to Mumbai!!! The book - To Serve Indians - it's a cookbook!!!!

And 17 is correct - the butter chicken and the lamb vindaloo are quite tasty - 3.99 and 3.49

Here is one where you fry the spices

This may be going deeper than you'd like at the outset, but grinding whole spices whenever possible makes a huge difference. I have a cheap Hamilton Beach coffee grinder that I use only for spices. The container is stainless and it can be removed and washed in the dishwasher, which is much nicer than the ones that can only be wiped out dry.

A spice tiffin (masala dabba) makes cooking Indian food a lot less daunting. Open one lid and you have seven containers of spices open and ready to go. What you fill it with is up to you, but if you're working with a single tiffin some of the basics are ground cumin, cumin seeds, coriander, Kashmiri chili, black mustard seeds, garam masala, and in the center container you can save space by combining some of the easily separated items like bay leaves, cinnamon sticks, cardamom pods, cloves, and peppercorns.

[italic]The Spice Tree[/italic] is a wonderful book to start out with because it touches on the theory behind Indian cooking; why certain spices have always been used in certain combinations, why they're used with this ingredient but not that one, the order in which things should be added and why that is, etc.

In addition to the standard recipes there are also tree diagrams for various ingredients which allow you to create your own recipes by picking a root (South Indian, Gujarati, mustard seed & red chili, and more.) and then moving up the tree and choosing what you'd like to add from the branches. It's very simple to follow along with but at the same time the understanding of what works together is sinking in.

I know, I know.....get a fucking blog.

R14 is the most important post of the thread.

Costco has a few nice meals. I like Sukhi's Chicken Tikka Masala.

Seriously OP. If you like Indian food in Indian restaurants, go to an Indian grocery store and get some real Indian frozen dinners. Trader Joe's is quite bland and Sukhis at Costco is maybe worse yet.

Cultural appropriation! Only Indian can cook Indian food!

R10, I'll throw in the VahChef on YouTube for fun. He's a little nuts, in a good way.

I've done his Panir Masala before, and it was relatively easy and good.

Madhur jaffrey is your friend, OP

Indian food is my favorite but the ingredients are a problem for me. I would like a "Hello Fresh" type of thing but with Indian food.

My grocery store has lots of fresh indian food in the refrigerator section and more in the freezer. Plus the 4 stores in my neighbourhood. I can manage Punjabi, Kerala and Tamil spicing but really the jarred sauces are too convent and my indian stores have boxed sauces. Just make cold sauces and salad by scratch and find a source for indian bread like items that you can fry or bake. Make your own rice. Myself I put cilantro in too many things so it would never be as authentic as prepared by Indians.

A third recommendation of anything by Madhur Jaffrey. She is the Julia Child of the Indian diaspora.

Yup: Madhur Jaffrey is the bomb. She's a vivid writer, and a born teacher -- her recipes are all pretty much foolproof and the instructions are both clear and inspiring. Also she's prolific, with more than 2 dozen books to her name, including cookbooks and memoirs. She's still publishing, I think, at 84, and has been since 1973,

Why do Indian restaurants often have all you can eat lunch buffet? I went to one where I eat dinner often and the chicken tikka masala looked different, the owner saw me and brought out the proper one from dinner without prompting from me.

I love indian food but there are just too many ingredients to each dish for me to make at home.