Vij's Elegant and Inspired Indian Cuisine [Paperback]

I am a pretty confident cook with a fair bit of experience with Indian cuisine, and I had been looking forward to getting this book for some time.

I just prepared an Indian dinner and prepared a number of recipes from the cookbook. Some were definitely home-runs, particularly the beef short ribs. A few were total failures, and others would have been if I had not made adjustments. Examples:

1) The spiced roasted nuts called for 1 TABLEspoon of salt for one pound of nuts, which made them essentially inedible (and I am fond of salty snacks, and I don't have any particular concern about the health effects of salt).

2) The spiced candied walnuts were also too salty, to my palate at least.

3) Vij family's chicken curry also called for a TABLEspoon of salt for a sauce that was only about 3 cups liquid--learning from my nut experiences [and common sense] I cut this down to 1 tsp, which was more reasonable. The sauce broke down and ended up very oily, so I used an immersion blender on it and it came out great.

4) The sturgeon and mussels in the tomato cream curry also called for a TABLEspoon of salt in about 6 cups of broth--I put in about half that and still found it a bit too salty. This whole dish left me wanting for something: The extra salt notwithstanding, it seemed mainly sour--I can think of a bunch of different ways I would rather have mussels, anyway.

5) The long green beans and potatoes were good with about half the recommended salt (again, a TABLEspoon in about 7 cups of liquid). This dish pointed out another oddity in the recipes: Sometimes, the ratio of the ingredients didn't make sense: Do we really want 9 oz of potatoes and 9 oz of green beans in 7 cups of liquid? I mean, that is soupy even for soup.

6) Along these lines, I liked the sauteed arugula and spinach with paneer (after cutting the one TABLEspoon of salt back), but the recipe ends up with 2 pounds of greens for 9 oz of paneer. The photo shows the dish as I presented it, with maybe 10 leaves of greens per hunk of paneer. That was great, but it left me with a huge amount of leftover greens in coconut curry, which didn't make sense ot me. If I had put them all on the plate they would have totally overwhelmed the paneer.

7) Same issue with the seasonal vegetables with black chickpea rice. Great dish (reducing the TABLEspoon of salt in the vegetables to a teaspoon or so), but as written you will end up with, oh, about 6 times as many vegetables as you want.

8) The black chickpea curry would have turned out watery and bland if I had followed the recipes and used 9 cups of water for the already soaked chickpeas plus an additional 2 cups for the masala. After I cooked the chickpeas, I put in a minimal amount of the cooking water in with the masala (just enough to submerge the chickpeas). They ended up being spicy and delicious--the best chickpea curry I have ever had. Oh, I also pureed a bit of the chickpeas to thicken the sauce, which worked nicely. Another salt mystery: This recipe calls for only 1/2 Tablespoon of salt in 11 cups of fluid plus the chickpeas and masala. This would almost certainly have not been enough.

9) The beef short ribs were truly excellent, though I decided to brown them before braising them. I will make these again. And one final salt mystery: This recipe calls for no salt at all!

One final note: These recipes call for an appalling amount of oil and ghee--often 1/2 cup per recipe. In some cases this is essential for cooking the onions and the spices properly. But in some cases it was just plain oily. In the future I might start with half of the required oil or ghee and add extra if needed.

All in all, I am glad that I have the book and will be using it again. But the novice cook should approach these recipes with caution. If you want a more reliable (and more traditional) cookbook, check out Camillia Panjabi's "50 Great Curries of India."

Owners of Vij's in Vancouver; Vikram Vij and his wife, Meeru Dhalwala, have put together a fantastic reference for Indian Cuisine.

The book starts with a detailed explanation of, and some colloquial terms for, the Indian spices and ingredients used within the text that the average North American might not be familiar with. The step by step recipes are simple, and often complimented by narrative explaining differences in methods and results, esp. between the Vij and Dhalwala families.

The tone of the work is very personal and casual; encouraging the reader to experiment with the basic palette of ingredients & spices presented, to create the flavour and texture best suited to their family's taste.

An absolute joy to have added to my kitchen reference shelf!

This is a good reference for Indian food for the more experienced - I've picked up some excellent ideas for flavour combinations etc from here. I wouldn't recommend buying this if you're new to Indian food, because as someone else already pointed out, a lot of the recipes are wrong (i.e. they don't match the food that's prepared in the restaurant with the same names). Watch out for anything that calls for a certain quantity of water, as these are usually about 2-3 times greater than what's needed. I found this with several of the curries, including the Black Chickpea curry.