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Photo: Anu Pushkarna

Desi flavour Chef Sitangsu Chakravarty

“This one is a little different from the earlier one,” the chef states. The name, “No added Fat” is the defining factor. Explains the chef, “The focus of my earlier book, ‘Best of India’ was on regional recipes but my latest book features dishes which are not fat-free but have ingredients that cook on their own oil. There is no added fat in them.” So the word ‘oil’ can’t be spotted in any of the pages, an unusual omission in an Indian cookbook.

The book, published by Pearson Education, has a good blend of traditional dishes and recipes born out of the chef’s attempt at combining interesting ingredients to avoid added fat.

So along with the likes of idlis, avail and dhoklas, etc., which traditionally have zero oil, the book has dishes like jhinga chaat papita, sabzi salad, sabut moong ka gosht, posto murgh, safed machhi, dahi ka shorba, matar ki roti, etc. with not a drop of added oil.

“I don’t claim these recipes to be mine alone. Anyone can come up with them,” says the chef. “With this book, I want to highlight the fact that we always have had recipes which need no extra oil. We have always used ingredients that have natural oil like poppy seeds, mustard seeds, yoghurt and coconut paste, etc. which are used as a base for a dish. In many of our traditional dishes, we roast the ingredients instead of frying them. That underlines the fact that Indian food need not be heavy and fatty,” says the master chef with a degree from Culinary Institute of America in New York. His version of matar ki roti is not basted with oil, the nariyal chawal has roasted mustard seeds, curry leaves and red chillies and oil is replaced with water. There are many examples.

Since meat has its own fat, cooking it becomes easier with mustard seeds, yoghurt, coconut paste, roasted til seeds or poppy seeds as the oil base.

During his years of working as a chef outside India, Chef Sitangsu felt, “Indian cuisine is not looked as glamour food.” A lot is to be blamed on little experimentation in Indian cuisine, he says. “Our people will also have to help. We often discard a dish, however good it tastes, if it doesn’t look authentic.”

He gives examples: “It is no surprise to see a Frenchman going out to eat French food in France or a Japanese doing it in Japan. But in India it is the opposite. It is so difficult to bring an Indian to an Indian restaurant that serves traditional food little differently but he will happily try out other cuisines whether they are authentic or not.” That is why, he adds, “You don’t see chef-run restaurants in India. Ritu Dalmia has successfully done it with Diva but it serves Italian cuisine. Sanjeev Kapoor started with Indian food but it is more of a commercial venture.”

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