Kashmiri gushtaba recipe..

Some good days make me walk to the market, I get good produce home and make great food for ourselves. Other days I just rely on what I buy weekly. The days I get minced mutton home are the ones when I get to have an easy meal that tastes like heaven. Gushtaba is one dish that comes from heaven. Kashmir, the heaven on earth. And the dish is truly heavenly.

It helps that it gets ready within half an hour, even when I have to work on two burners at a time, it's something anyone can do who knows shaping balls and boiling water. And someone who loves to work with nice aromatic spices, and still doesn't want too spicy food. Got the picture?

A decadent curry with delicate flavors of almost sweetish fennel and green cardamom, just a bit if warm heat from dry ginger and a slight kick from red chilly powder, all flavors melded beautifully in a yogurt and cream based curry..

Can it get any better?

ingredients..
For the meatballs ...
keema (machine ground) 250 gm
ginger minced or pounded 2 tsp
2 green cardamoms pounded and powdered well
2 cloves powdered
1/2 tsp black pepper pounded
2 pinches of salt
mutton stock 3-4 cups

Mix all these together , knead the mutton mince together so everything gets mixed up properly.

For the gravy...
fresh yogurt ( I used from a tub) 200 gm
ghee 2 tsp
one medium sized onion sliced
one fat garlic clove
1 tsp fennel seeds
1-2 tsp dry ginger powder
1/2 tsp special garam masala
black pepper powder 1/2 tsp
red chilly powder 1/2 tsp
salt to taste
heavy cream 3 tbsp ( I used malai)
fresh mint 4-5 leaves or dry mint a pinch

Most people use fennel powder in the yogurt gravy but I prefer grinding whole fennel along with the fried onion. This gives a better flavor as the fennel is freshly ground. Sieving the onion and fennel seeds paste ensures you get a smooth gravy.

procedure...


Using freshly ground keema is the key to a great tasting Gushtaba. Most people like pounding the meat fresh at home. But that is something I can't bring myself to do. So I get my freshly machine ground meat from the market as I said earlier. Just get a few bony pieces too to make the stock.




Boil the bony pieces of mutton in a pressure cooker with 3 cups of water , 2 bay leaves and a small piece of ginger. This will be stock for boiling the meatballs. The stock can be made ahead and even can be used for making soups.

Make oblong balls with the mince meat mix while you have kept a pan of boiling mutton stock on stove. Gently slide the oblong balls into the boiling stock with salt to taste. Let them boil on gentle heat till you do the preparations to make the curry sauce.


The meatballs will be fished out from this boiling stock and the stock will be saved to make a soup for another meal. The same can be used to adjust consistency when the yogurt gravy is cooking. Alternately, you can boil the meatballs in plain water, in that case the meatballs loose some flavor but are still great tasting as the dish is quite mildly spiced.

The meatballs take about 15 minutes to cook in the stock, they get enlarged a bit and the shape gets distorted a bit, but they wouldn't break if you don't thrash them with the ladle. Just be gentle with them.

After the meatballs get boiling, start working on the other burner with another pan. I told you , you have to work on two burners.



Heat the ghee in a pan and fry the sliced onion till pinkish brown, adding salt to minimise the time and effort as there is less ghee. Use more ghee if in a hurry.



Transfer the fried onion slices to the jar of a mixie and make a paste along with a tsp of fennel seeds and a clove of garlic. This paste has to be sieved into the cooking gravy. I do it directly into the pan when required, do it ahead of time if you can't handle it above the pan.

Whisk the yogurt well and sieve it if you have doubts about curdling the yogurt while heating. Mine anyways gets curdles a little so I just whisk it using a hand blender. Add 2 cups of water to the yogurt and whisk again.

Pour the whisked yogurt in a pan and start heating the pan on gentle flame, whisking all the while to prevent or minimise curdling , whatever the case. I work for minimising.

Now add the dry powders and the sieved fried onion paste into the boiling yogurt. Keep whisking while it boils. Add the heavy cream and mix well.


Fish out the cooked meatballs from the boiling stock and tip them gently into the boiling yogurt mix. Cook covered on lowest flame for another 10 minutes , or till he fat droplets are seen on the surface.




Cooking with the yogurt gravy, the meatballs take about 5-7 minutes more. Some people add a little ghee at this stage. You can choose to add that too. I like some more heavy cream added in the last minutes of cooking sometimes. But that is optional.

Add the mint, fresh or dried, and serve hot. It goes really well with soft chapatis or plain boiled rice. A side of fresh garden salad will be a delight to have with it.

This is a food any beginner cook can make. It looks complicated and on the table too it looks like a great effort to put together. But it's a simple dish to rustle up if you have a basic idea of balancing the flavors.

Do you like your meatballs in a more robust spicy gravy?

A keema kofta curry is to come shortly too. My personal favorite is this Gushtaba from Kashmir as the taste of the mutton is not overpowered by the spices added.

The spicier keema kofta curry is a Awadhi version of meatballs, liked by all who love the earthy spicy gravy with a stronger flavor of mutton. More about the Awadhi keema koftas some other time. Very soon though.

Enjoy Kashmiri Gushtaba till then.....

A sumptuous lunch at the Empress of China...

I am very very apprehensive of eating out because of two reasons. I have lost interest in going out and enjoy during the last decade of my life, interestingly the time when the culinary scene in the country got an overhaul. And secondly I have encountered a few places which claim good food and it turns out they serve substandard ingredients doused in spices so the fresh taste of any ingredient is not distinguishable anymore. Most Indians like spicy food after all. Drowned in spices to say the least.

I like spicy food too. But I respect the fresh ingredients more than that. Spicing just so the ingredients's character is enhanced and not diminished.

So I was apprehensive about the food when Sid Khullar suggested to do a review of Empress of China's lunch menu with a few Delhi bloggers. Empress of China is a part of Eros hotels managed by Hilton. Meeting a few fellow bloggers was my reason to go there in the first place. I was in for a surprise as the food was really good as well. And at affordable cost too.

'Big place, big menu, small price' as Sid put it to introduce the menu, it really was such.

Not just the number of dishes being served, the quality was really very good.

The starters were quite delicately spiced, soft and succulent. Steamed chicken wings, Stir fried baby corn with sweet chilly sauce, Steamed dumpling with mixed vegetables, Steamed siew mai with minced prawns stuffing, and a delicious Steamed chicken with spring onions, garlic etc. On the plate clockwise.

The best was the Baby corn stir fried and laced with sweet chilly sauce. Tremendously flavorful and great texture. Chicken wings were rightly steamed and flavorful, glutinous and soft. The steamed boneless chicken was good but nothing special to write about. The Steamed dumpling was not good at ll, I don't like it when the pastry is dry and chewy. Someone who makes quite decent dimsums , this was a case of double disappointment as the Siew mai was floury and under cooked too. Dumplings apart, I liked everything else.

Main course had all my favorites. Sauteed fish with black bean was soft, flaky and delicately flavored. Prawns were well done, fresh, paired well with Asparagus. Schezuan chicken was rightly hot, well spiced for my taste. The best in the main course was Lotus stems and water chestnuts in black pepper sauce. I make something similar and that was just yummy. Silken tofu with preserved vegetables in chilly bean sauce was very very flavorful and rightly delicate too. The chef informed it was imported silken tofu.

My favorite bites were the very fresh serving of garden greens, it looked like it came right from my own garden. Beautiful and so good to bite into. I had a second and probably a third serving of the garden fresh sauteed vegetables, Broccoli and Bok choy to be precise.

Refreshing Jasmine tea was served along the meal, one more favorites of mine, though all my teas are in between the meals thing. With such a meal with varied textures and flavors, the tea served as a palate cleanser to say the least.

I would have been really happy if it was a Chinese dessert too. But I guess there are no takers for those and probably the Chinese don't finish their meals as Indians do. Their desserts are a meal or a snack in itself rather than being served to wrap up a meal. No wonder Chef Thomas Wee came to meet us just after the main course concluded, before the dessert was served. The food was really wonderful. Forget the dimsums.

And forget the chocolate cake with ice cream too. Not that it wasn't good , as I finished just about half of my serving. Though there was no space or interest left for such a regular kinda dessert after such a sumptuous, refreshing meal.

Thanks to Mr Sanjay Keswani, Operations Director of the hotel who introduced us to the lunch menu and had great discussions with us. I was talking about how I was tempted to meat a few fellow bloggers there. I met Parul Paratap Shirazi, Charis Alfred Bhagianathan, Jaspreet Singh and Prateek Rungta apart from Sid Khullar. A great conversation about food among foodies is something to look forward to anytime.

Good ambiance, good conversations and good food was what we enjoyed there to the core. I would recommend this place for someone who wants to see beyond the several avatars of Indo-Chinese food available aplenty all around. A calm serene place to have a refreshing meal.