♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ (indistinct chatter) - I'm here in East Ham, outside of central London off High Street, to discover what's new in Indian cooking in Indian restaurants.

You know, after World War II, many fish and chip shops, uh, were taken over by Indian cooks, and they served a curry sauce with the fish that eventually became curry with rice, and they were off to the races, curry now being a national dish here in Britain.

What's happening now, however, is that instead of just Northern Indian cooking, it's dozens of other cuisines all over India.

Obviously, it's very complicated.

We're here to discover what's new.

Gunpowder potatoes with lots of spices, fried okra, those are delicious.

And then a chicken salan, which is a form of curry, usually has sesame seeds, peanuts, and dried coconut.

So stay with us as we go through London looking for what's new and interesting in the Indian restaurants of London.

- Funding for this series was provided by the following... - Introducing Hestan ProBond, crafted from the resilience of cold-forged stainless steel.

We collaborate with top chefs to redefine cookware and the kitchen experience.

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- Our first stop is Dishoom, a very popular Indian restaurant with multiple outposts in London, and there I spoke to Rishi Anand, the head chef and recipe developer.

- How do I describe the cooking in Dishoom?

I would say Dishoom is from Bombay with love.

Parsi cafes, street food, it will all come from Bombay and the love for Bombay we have.

The dish gunpowder potato, actually we... it's kind of a innovation.

Our inspiration was we use "gunpowder" in South Indian cuisine.

We just used the blend of our own spices and mix it with lovely roasted potatoes and with lots of love.

It's just, uh, delicious.

So we're gonna roast the potatoes first.

The process is really simple.

We always use new potatoes, which are small, tiny, lovely, cute little potatoes.

You take out in the bowl, crush them and put masala, we use kebab masala in it, which is a Dishoom signature.

Every chef in India have their own spice mix, which they call a "secret masala."

So whenever you ask an Indian chef, they say, "Oh, we have secret spices."

We put the spices in, some lime juice, and the friend of potato, which is butter.

Spring onion, coriander, and green chilies, which we're gonna add it, give it a nice green color to it.

It's tangy, spicy.

In Hindi we call it chatpata.

Chatpata means something which have all flavors, which have a bit of tangy, spicy, sour, and salty, obviously.

And it's ready to serve.

Who doesn't like potatoes?

- Our final destination for the day is Hyderabadi Spice in East Ham, where many of London's top chefs come to get a curry education from Zuber Momin, - We are Hyderabadi Spice.

These are some unique dishes that Hyderabad is famous for.

This dish is called Hyderabadi mirchi ka salan.

We take some oil, and we temper it with, uh, mustard seeds and curry leaves.

We add some fresh ginger to it, chopped fresh ginger.

And we add some turmeric powder, red chili powder to give it a deep color.

Then we add our salan gravy.

The salan gravy is basically made with sesame seeds, peanuts, dried coconut, and it is finished with tamarind pulp.

♪ ♪ Then we add the base chicken gravy that we've got and we finish it with cream and coriander leaves.

(laughs) It's too much of love we put in it!

Our passion we put in.

That is what makes this dish, uh, you know, unique and tasty.

This is the history of Hyderabad, and I think we should show it what Hyderabadi food is all about.

♪ ♪ - Once in a while, I come across a recipe that's so stupendous, I get so excited.

I was in East Ham in Hyderabadi Spice, a little tiny storefront, and the chef made me a curry, a chicken salan, which we call Hyderabadi chicken curry.

It was just absolutely phenomenal.

Lots of ingredients, very complex flavor, terrific.

So, before we go on, let's just define what a curry is.

So, I had lunch with a woman who wrote The Philosophy of Curry.

Her definition is, in short, it's a spice dish of Indian origin or influence, in which vegetables or meat, et cetera, are cooked in a pot with a gravy and made with tomatoes, onions, coconut, yogurt, et cetera, et cetera.

So, essentially, it's pieces of protein or vegetables cooked in a sauce, and that's about all you can say about it.

In any case, this recipe is terrific.

But two words of warning, this is not a Tuesday night recipe.

This is definitely a Saturday afternoon recipe.

And there are a couple ingredients you probably should go out and get because they really are transformative.

So we're gonna start with a Dutch oven.

I'm gonna turn the heat up.

And the first rule in making a curry is you want to toast spices or ingredients.

In this case, we have peanuts, we have coconut, which is a common ingredient in many curries, as well as sesame seeds.

Okay, I think that's good.

You can see the coconut is browned, it's not burned.

In the blender, and we're gonna make, actually, the curry sauce in the blender.

So, next step is we're gonna put the onion... (food sizzling) ...couple tablespoons of oil, teaspoon of salt, And we're gonna cook the onions, lightly brown them.

I'm gonna turn the heat down just a little.

You want to take your time with onions.

So this will be six or seven minutes.

So, we brown the onions, lightly brown them.

Garlic and ginger go in next.

Just briefly.

You want to be able to smell that aroma.

Take just a minute, minute and a half.

Now, the spices, and this is typical, you cook spices in with a sofrito, the onion, the oil, and we're gonna bloom those flavors.

Kashmiri chili.

You could use paprika and cayenne, for example, if you don't have that, turmeric, and then garam masala, which just means a mix of spices.

So I'm just gonna toast this for, like, 30 seconds.

Again, this really revives the spices.

It brings them out, makes them aromatic.

And the whole point of this dish is to have a tremendous amount of very different aromatic flavors and aromas.

So now we're gonna add water to this, a cup of water, and we'll deglaze the pan.

So this goes into the blender, as well.

And now we're gonna fry some of the spices.

So you get three ways to do spices here.

Start with the same pot we've cleaned out.

Two or three tablespoons of oil is good.

We're gonna heat that up.

Now we have three more spices-- we have cumin seeds, obviously, whole seeds, mustard seeds, and we also have curry leaves.

Curry leaves are optional in this recipe.

Now, some people say they're citrusy.

There has sort of a hint of anise in it.

But if you can't find them, you can't find them.

So we're gonna fry these for a minute or two.

Again, that's really gonna bring out the flavor.

Okay, we're toasted.

So let's add our sauce base, the puree.

Now, you can't smell this at home, but this is so complex, and that's why I fell in love with this dish as soon as I went back in that kitchen and watched him make it.

So, the last thing we're gonna add before we add the chicken, is tamarind.

This is tamarind paste.

I'm gonna say you need to go out and buy tamarind paste.

I know.

It's like one of those ingredients you don't have.

This is just one of those dishes where, you know, the curry leaves are optional.

You really need tamarind.

Tamarind has a flavor like nothing else.

And it makes this dish.

It's really the base of this dish.

So you can find it in a jar in the supermarket.

I've tried that.

I don't think that's very good.

It doesn't have a really rich flavor.

So you really should go out and buy this.

So you add a little bit of water, half a cup to the tamarind paste, and work it like that, and then you strain it out.

Okay.

So I'm going to add the tamarind.

And add another cup of water.

So, two pounds.

You can use cut-up chicken breast or thighs.

We prefer thighs, usually, because they can't be overcooked.

Bring it up to a simmer.

So, these thighs will cook in 12 to 15 minutes.

If it was chicken breast, it might cook in eight to ten minutes.

It cooks very quickly.

So at Hyderabadi Spice, I didn't eat this with rice, actually, we just had the curry and some flatbread, which is what I'm going to do now, because I don't want to dilute the effect of this curry.

It's so good.

Mmm.

That's pretty good.

(laughs) That's really good.

This is one of my top ten recipes of all time.

It's a cooking lesson in how to make a curry, in that you are frying spices, you're toasting spices, you're cooking them with oil and onions, and you're using lots of different kinds of flavors, including nuts and coconut, et cetera, to create not just one flavor, but a whole layer of flavors here.

And it's not actually a hard recipe to do.

It is just absolutely spectacular.

♪ ♪ These crispy on the outside, dense and creamy on the inside potatoes are our riff on those that Chris had at Dishoom restaurant in London.

They're called gunpowder potatoes because of the explosive blend of flavors that the potatoes are tossed with.

Now, at Dishoom, they grill the potatoes on long skewers until they're soft, then they smash them and toss them with a mixture of butter, spices, and fresh aromatics.

For our version, we do things a little bit differently.

We soften the potatoes in boiling water, then we smash them.

Then we roast them in a high-heat oven until crisp on the outside.

Then we toss them with butter, that delicious blend of spices and fresh aromatics.

This recipe works best with small potatoes, about an inch to an inch and a half in diameter.

They should be uniformly sized so they cook through evenly and small enough that you don't have to cut them, because we want the skin to remain intact.

Now, in a large pot, we combine two and a half pounds of our tiny Yukon Gold potatoes.

We add three tablespoons of salt, which seems like a lot, but it actually helps the potato skin firm up, and then two quarts of water.

We bring that to a boil, and we cook it, stirring occasionally, until we test the potatoes about 20 to 25 minutes later.

And you want to feel that the potatoes have no resistance left.

Okay, so, it's time to drain the potatoes, right into a colander.

Just transfer the potatoes right from the colander onto a rimmed baking sheet, and toss them with about three tablespoons of olive oil.

Then, to smash them, you don't want to smash them too much.

Use the flat bottom of, say, a dry measuring cup or a ramekin, and just press down lightly on each potato, just until they crack open a little bit.

But you want the potatoes to stay mostly intact.

Now it's time to go into the oven.

The oven has been preheated to 500 degrees, super hot.

We'll roast the potatoes without stirring them for about 20 minutes.

The skin will get a little blistery brown at that point.

Then we take them out of the oven and sprinkle over some freshly sliced jalapenos.

Then they go back into the hot oven, and they cook until fully crisp, a little browned, and the jalapenos have started to caramelize around the edges, another ten to 15 minutes.

Okay, while the potatoes finish roasting, it's time to assemble our explosive blend of spices.

We're using whole seeds, because those will give us the most intense flavors.

We also want to maintain a little texture.

So with whole seeds, we can grind them and keep them very coarse.

We're using cumin, fennel, and coriander.

For grinding, you have a choice of using a mortar and pestle if you have one at home.

Or you can use an electric spice grinder.

If you use the grinder, be careful to just pulse until they're coarsely ground.

Don't overdo it till they're powdery.

So I'm going to use the mortar and pestle today.

We'll put all three seeds in there.

And then just give them a coarse grind.

(tapping) Okay, that looks great.

Now, we're making our own customized spice blend, just as they do at Dishoom.

One of the spices we kept that they use also is fenugreek.

If you can find it, it's an amazingly aromatic, very unique spice.

It's a leafy herb.

You can get it in dried leaf form, you can get it ground in a powder like we have here.

To me, the aroma of fenugreek reminds me of the smell you get when you walk into an Indian restaurant and you know you're about to have some delicious Indian food.

We're going to use a little butter here.

Now, we're going to melt our butter first, add the spices to it briefly to bloom them and help bring out their flavor even more.

We're going to just let this butter melt.

We have four tablespoons.

Okay, the butter is melted.

Going to turn this down a bit.

Don't let it come to a full simmer or anything.

Add the ground spices right away, and the fenugreek.

Give it a quick stir.

You'll smell it immediately.

(sighs) That's what you want.

You just want it to get aromatic.

Then turn it off and remove the pan from the heat.

So now the potatoes just came out of the oven after the chilies were added.

They are all roasty and toasty, and the skin is crisp.

The chilies also got a little caramelized on the edges, which are beautiful.

Right out of the oven, when the potatoes are still hot, pour that spiced butter over the top and toss them to coat everything evenly.

Then add the scallions and cilantro and give them few more tosses, and then they're ready to serve.

I mean, potatoes are great, but these potatoes are really great.

And they look as good as they taste.

They're golden and crisp on the outside, dense and creamy on the inside.

At Dishoom restaurant, they serve their potatoes with a raita, and we were inspired to do the same.

It's a simple mixture of yogurt, some fresh herbs, a bit of lime juice for bright acidity.

If you have the ingredients at home, it's easy enough to throw together, but it's completely optional.

So, our Indian-spiced smashed potatoes may just convince you that potatoes could be a main course.

♪ ♪ - So in Chris's recent trip to London, he came back raving about these French fries he had at Hyderabadi Spice.

He also loved the okra from Dishoom, dusted with a masala spice mixture.

So we had an order here to figure out what makes them so great.

First of all, though, I'm going to start and get a grasp on what will make the perfectly crisp fry-- crispy on the outside, fluffy on the inside.

So let's back up here and talk about the potatoes first, and how to prep them and get them ready for frying.

So, to cut a potato into fries, peel it down, nice sharp knife.

We're going to cut crosswise, quarter-inch slices.

Slabs, if you will.

So now I'm going to take half of them, stack them back up, reassemble them, and cut the same direction into quarter-inch slices.

And there it is, very simple.

Right after they're cut, throw them right in the water.

That will help start rinsing off a little extra starch.

I want to rinse off this water here.

You can see how cloudy it is, that's the starch coming off the cut surface.

I'm going to drain them in a colander and rinse them until the water is clear.

That will ensure that they'll get crispy on the outside when we fry.

And then afterward, another key, important step-- I'm going to put them on the towel-lined sheet pan and blot them dry.

You don't want any excess water on fries before they go into the oil, that will pop and explode all over your kitchen.

So I've got a few options I want to try to get to that perfectly crisp French fry.

This batch, just cutting them, throwing them in oil is not going to work.

You can see, they're like, limp, and soggy.

(chewing): That's not going to work.

So first batch I want to do here, I want to try starting in cold oil.

So, I'm going to put the dried potatoes in a deep pot here, and then I'll cover them with some vegetable oil to about an inch, and turn the heat on pretty high.

And it's going to slowly come up and they'll start to bubble, and I'm going to see what happens there with the exterior of this French fry.

It took 23 minutes to cook that batch of fries.

You want a nice, evenly golden fry, and these look a little splotchy.

So I'm not getting the crispness on the outside that I want.

I'm trying a double fry here.

These fries were cut, rinsed, dried, fried once for about four minutes, and now I'm going to put them back in the hot oil and see what we get.

This is kind of nice.

They are crisping up here and browning pretty quickly, so this might work well.

Yeah, these are looking good.

I can tell just by the way they feel that they're a little crispier than that first batch.

So, to work on that interior texture, I want to try blanching these.

I'm going to add a little acid to the water, just cook them until they're softened up enough before we fry.

That way, I can tell if I can affect the interior of the fry by cooking them first.

So these into some hot oil.

All right, my blanched fries look beautiful.

Nice golden brown.

(shaking) I can tell they're a little crispier than the other batches just by how they feel on the strainer.

So, cold oil is a bit of a surprise, but I love the blanching, too.

So, got a little more work to do.

I think we're getting close, but we'll see what Chris thinks.

♪ ♪ - You know, I love London for a lot of reasons.

One of the great restaurants is Dishoom, which has three or four locations in London, and I went there for lunch, and they had a great dish.

It was fried okra, but with a masala, a spice coat.

And then I ended up that night at Hyderabadi Spice and they serve, essentially French fries with masala.

And that seemed like a simple but wonderful concept.

Problem is, how do you make French fries?

Which actually turned out to be the hard part.

So Wes here at Milk Street went into the kitchen to figure that out, and there was a lot to figure out.

- Yes.

We started out using a few tips and pointers from our friend Kenji López-Alt.

He's done various amounts of testing on French fries.

So we started there, and we ended up with this method that is a little more streamlined and every bit as delicious.

Nice, crunchy fries, fluffy in the inside.

So our first step here was blanching potatoes.

So we're starting with white vinegar, three tablespoons, and then a couple tablespoons of salt.

Now, we're going to put enough water in here to cover the potatoes by about an inch.

Now, this is the first cooking, and these will essentially be cooked through when we've done blanching them.

But they're not going to be the most pleasant experience.

Because we've put that vinegar in there, they're going to have almost like a rubbery snap to them on the outside.

So that's the key, and that will help us retain moisture inside and make them crisper when we get to frying.

So these will come up to a boil.

We'll just simmer those for about ten minutes, until they're basically cooked through but still holding their shape.

We don't want to overcook at this point or they'll break and fall apart.

- Yeah, I think the vinegar helps strengthen the pectin, which holds the starch together.

So if you don't use vinegar, these fries tend to blow up or they get sort of hollow inside.

- Yeah.

- So you get a better texture.

So the vinegar helps them retain their shape, but also makes it a crispier fry.

- Exactly.

And then we'll also add a few other elements to these when we fry that will help with that process as well.

So here are our blanched fries.

We rinse them in cold water once we dump them out, and you can feel them-- they're cooked through, but they're almost, like, rubbery.

And you probably can taste the vinegar on that.

- Nothing like a cold, blanched French fry.

(laughs) - So, this is an important step, and then we move on to frying.

Now, there are a lot of other folks who say double fry, but this was the most streamlined method.

We only need to fry them once, because this did most of the cooking already.

Now, as far as the spicing goes, these, of course, you had masala spice.

Now, masala is an Indian blend of spices.

We have cumin, ginger, and Kashmiri powder.

So now I'm going to add a teaspoon and a half of salt and three quarters teaspoon of pepper.

And I'm going to mix this up.

Now we're going to use this twice in the recipe.

And we're going to save a couple tablespoons back for seasoning them at the end.

Of course, any chef will tell you season fries the minute they come out of the fryer, absorbs right in.

So we're going to save that for when we fry.

The rest, we're going to dump into some potato starch.

Now, seems a little crazy.

We did all this work to get the starch out of the potatoes, now we're putting starch back in.

So, what is that about?

Potato starch is finer than cornstarch.

And what that's going to do is, like you mentioned, it's going to coat the outer part of the French fry.

And when it hits the hot oil, it seals the moisture in.

So that will promote fluffiness inside the fry, but make a nice crisp exterior.

If you think about a baked potato, that's what the skin does.

It holds all the moisture in.

A perfectly baked potato, when you bust it open, is fluffy and soft.

That's what we're after.

So, those spices go right in.

We're going to mix that up, and we're going to season these fries with the starch spice mixture.

So these will be plenty flavorful when they're out.

So we took these out of the colander and put them on a paper towel.

You want the blanche fries to be as dry as possible.

So if you wouldn't mind just giving those a toss, then we will be ready to fry.

So we have in the pot peanut oil.

Of course, peanut oil is going to give you the best flavor of anything fried.

So we do like using peanut oil.

You could use other vegetable oil, sunflower oil we use a lot here.

About a third of a batch at a time.

They go right into the hot oil.

We fry them for five to eight minutes at 375.

We try to monitor the temperature to keep it nice and hot.

So I'm just going to take about a third of the fries... Gently drop them in there, try not to splash you.

- I'm going to step back while you do this, so.

- There we go.

If you want to just kind of move them around a bit.

Again, we're just frying now to get them nice and crisp, fluffy.

When you're deep frying, never fill the pot too much with oil.

Start with about an inch and a half in a deep pot, that's plenty of depth.

Because if you put too much oil before you start, you could possibly have a fire.

So we'll just keep cooking until they're a nice, light golden brown.

That takes about five to eight minutes.

- So these are almost done.

- They'll go a little bit darker.

The interesting thing, too, about these fries, when you take them out, we season them right away.

We did the first two batches.

As they sit, that starch on the outside, it gets crisper as it sits.

- Hm.

- Typically you'd think, "Oh, it's coming right out of the oil, it's going to be crunchy right then."

But they crisp up as they sit.

Smells great.

Where's my burger?

- I'm a firm believer that once in a while you can just make dinner out of one thing.

- Like fries?

- Like strawberry shortcake in June.

That's dinner, folks.

Yeah, or like fries.

- Yeah, even better.

So now finishing off with that spice mix, and we can even throw a little more salt on there.

Nothing better than a salty fry.

- Mm.

- And that's it.

So we have a really nicely crisp, fluffy on the inside, and very well-seasoned fry.

- These are really good.

Nice crunch on the outside, nice and fluffy on the inside.

- That spice blend really is great on anything.

If you are as bold as making your own homemade potato chips, same deal, it'd be great.

- One of the things I noticed at Hyderabadi Spice and Dishoom, the spice mix was not super spicy.

It was interesting, but they're not doing it to blow your head off.

- Yeah.

- It's not super spicy in terms of heat, but it just added, really, that nice extra dimension.

So, masala-spiced French fries-- Hyderabadi Spice in East Ham in London, also at Dishoom they do it with okra.

A nice, interesting, complex spice mixture on top of French fries.

And the best way to make French fries as well.

You can get this recipe-- and I think you're going to want this recipe-- and all the recipes from this season of Milk Street at MilkStreetTV.com.

And these are absolutely phenomenal.

Recipes and episodes from this season of Milk Street are available at MilkStreetTV.com, along with shopping lists, printer-ready recipes, and step-by-step videos.

Access our content anytime to change the way you cook.

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Call 855-MILK-177 or order online.

- Funding for this series was provided by the following... - Introducing Hestan ProBond, crafted from the resilience of cold-forged stainless steel.

We collaborate with top chefs to redefine cookware and the kitchen experience.

Italian craftsmanship meets innovation with Hestan ProBond.

♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪