If your only experience of Indian salads is the little warm bag of lettuce and onions in the takeaway bag, then think again.
True, the Indian culinary repertoire has never really had any salad items to speak of. The nearest that Indian cuisine can offer to a ‘salad’ is a side item called kachumber, made of diced tomatoes, onion, cucumber and coriander leaf. Other popular lighter side dishes, dips and snacks in India include chaats, raitas and pakoras.
A growing choice
What is interesting though is that in recent years, there is a burgeoning choice of salads, which are being made available in quality Indian restaurants, particularly during the summer. Chefs are being ever more creative with ingredients and marrying them with spices and tantalising dressings to create subtly flavoured salads.
Full of texture
“One of our most popular items on the menu,” says Mehernosh Mody, executive chef of La Porte des Indes, a large and well-established London Indian restaurant with cooking influenced by cooking from Pondicherry, a former French colony in India, is the salad du metis. “I’ll vary the ingredients according to seasonality, but it always has a lovely, nutty taste and is full of texture. You also get delicious Indian flavours coming though in the form of tamarind, paprika and garlic.”
High protein
Chef-patron Andy Varma of Chakra, in London’s Notting Hill Gate, has four salads on his menu: green salad, prawn salad, curry patta burrata – the latter made of the Italian burrata cheese – and the most popular, yam chaat.
“The idea is to encourage people to have a high protein meal,” says Varma, “with salad and then a meat dish, cutting out rice and breads. With the yam chaat, what I do is use chunks of grilled yam and mix it with yoghurt. I then soften it further by mixing it in a mint and coriander chutney. I then mix in some tamarind chutney and garnish it with pieces of poppadum to give it that crunchy texture. I finish it off by sprinkling roasted cumin to give the salad an unmistakable Indian flavour.”
Be inventive
Alfred Prasad, head chef of the Michelin-starred Tamarind, in London’s Mayfair, says that as Indian cuisine has no equivalent of Nicoise, Greek, Waldorf or Caesar salad, you have to be inventive.
“The tandoori khumb is our most popular salad,” says Prasad, which we serve warm. I use three different types of mushrooms in it, Portabello, shitake and oyster, assembled with pickled silver-skin baby onions, plum tomatoes and a curry leaf olive oil dressing.
Endless combinations
Both Mody and Varma are keen to emphasise that when it comes to making Indian salads, there are endless combinations. Spinach leaves for instance, can be mixed with corn kernels, tomatoes, fresh coriander leaf, ginger, garlic and lemon or lime. Marinating strips of chicken or vegetables in a paste such as Patak’s before simply grilling makes a salad into something more substantial, yet still light.
Then you just need to make a simple dressing. Vinaigrette can be infused with all kinds of different spices and you can also add different spices to mayonnaise or just mix it with fresh chopped green mango and ginger.
If you’re inspired to get creative with Indian flavours in the kitchen tell us how you get on in the comments below.
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Recipes using Patak's pastes from Maunika Gowardhan