Batchelor Gourmet: The Beauty of Tarka
I like to cook. It’s a great feeling to know exactly what you’re eating, and having that home-made quality in your food. Since I live alone, I tend to gravitate toward ingredients that can either sit in my cupboard for a year, or that I can pick up from the grocery store in small portions and use that night. For example, I have a bunch of different grains and pastas in mason jars that keep pretty much indefinitely, such as quinoa, lentils, cous cous, oatmeal, etc. and whenever I’m cooking, I swing to the grocery and grab some veggies, herbs, and maybe some fresh animal parts.
The thing about the staple ingredients like cous cous and quinoa is that although they are hearty, they are pretty boring unless you add a little flavor to them. Quinoa is the biggest culprit in this regard— it’s got all the amino acids, making it essentially a complete protein. It tastes kind of like little grains of cardboard, though. Even adding olive oil and some salt, all you need to spice up some good pasta, isn’t enough, you still get that cardboard taste.
Enter Tarka. I first encountered it when I was looking for recipes that fit the way I keep and acquire ingredients. I had some green lentils laying around that I didn’t know what to do with, and after a quick search, I found a good way to put them to use in a recipe I lifted from the Maninas: Food Matters blog. I read “Incredibly easy and incredibly tasty” and it was on. The recipe is basically lentils, Tarka, and Garam Masala. It was friggin great. According to the blog,
“Tarka is an Indian technique of frying spices in ghee or oil, sometimes with the addition of some combination of onions, garlic and chillies. This is done either at the beginning of cooking, or at the end.”
In this case, the Tarka consisted of cumin seeds, chopped onions, garlic (recipe called for 1 clove, I put two), bird’s eye peppers (I used serrano), cinnamon, and ginger. The page made reference to this dish being Punjabi style; there are a bunch of different regional styles and I definitely need to explore them all. It’s exciting to stumble upon this because now I know at least one of the ways in which Indian people make their food so damn savory. I’ve tried doing the “throw a bunch of spices on and hope for the best” thing and it doesn’t seem to have the depth that I recognize in really heavily seasoned foods from that area of the world. She makes a good point that a lot of the essential and savory flavor in spices is fat soluble, and the ghee is the key to unlocking it. The ghee is the key.
I realized that with the flexibility of Tarka, I might be able to kill that cardboard taste of quinoa. I was right and now I throw some tarka on all my grains. Add a little Garam Masala and badda-bing you’re eating easy and good and authentically Indian. Batchelor gourmet at it’s best.
