Feature 12 June 19, 2015 • www.easterneye.eu • Like us on www.facebook.com/easterneye World of flavours in Britain by NEIL THOMPSON THE rise of cheap international flights and a multicultural society have tur- ned Britain into a nation of cosmopoli- tan foodies over the past few decades. The American pizza is just one in a long menu of recipes that have come to the UK down the years. It has been joined by Indian, Oriental, African and Eastern European cooking as relatively new cuisines join older ones in travel- ling from overseas to the tables of our restaurants and the shelves of our su- permarkets. Eastern Eye looks at the popularity of foreign cuisines in the UK and how they are influencing our shopping and entertainment habits. The category of ‘world foods’ or eth- nic minority cuisines that have gone on to revolutionise mainstream na- tional tastes can be divided into rough- ly six sub-cuisines – Chinese/Oriental, Indian, Mexican/Tex-Mex, Thai, Carib- bean and others (including Italian, French and Polish), with Indian and Chinese products being the longest established and most popular. Experts estimate that the overall val- ue of the UK market for ethnic cuisine is £1.6 billion, split between three sec- tors – foods, rice and drinks (divided between soft drinks and alcoholic bev- erages). Research shows that despite the growth of innovative new sectors such as Polish or Mexican food, British consumer appetites are still being wetted by the bold, fresh and tasteful approaches being brought to market by the purveyors of tradi- tional Indian cuisine. To many people around the world, Indian food just tastes really good. About 76 per cent of UK adults enjoy Indian food according to research an- alyst TNS, but it now seems that an important part of the cuisine’s global success is its unique chemistry. After looking at more than 2,000 Indian recipes, scien- tists have now found that Indian food flavours are prepared radically differ- ently to Western ones. Whereas West- ern dishes are frequently prepared with overlapping flavours, many Indian rec- ipes contain ingredients whose fla- vours do not. The Indian Institute of Technology in Jodhpur, Rajasthan, researched data on the recipes from a popular Indian cooking site, tarladalal.com. Each dish was broken down to its basic ingredi- ents and compared with others to see how often and how heavily its ingredi- ents shared flavour compounds. The result was that flavour sharing in Indian cuisine was significantly lower than researchers had expected. Compared to Western cuisine, Indian dishes used many spic- es with flavours that have no common chemical ground. This seems to be tied to the use of specific ingredients used frequently in Indian cooking, namely cayenne. This spice is the basis of the curry powders found in almost every Indian curry in existence. As a spice, cayenne is dis- tinctive and does not blend with other types of flavours. The same is true of other common ingredients in Indian food green like bell peppers, coriander and garam masala. The average Indian dish contains at least seven ingredients, with each of the spices uniquely placed in its recipe to shape the flavour-sharing pattern with the rest of the ingredients, the re- searchers found. Mixing Western foods like milk, butter, bread and rice, on the other hand, yielded flavour pairings which matched each other in contrast to the Indian flavour spectrum. The sharp distinctions between flavours in Indian recipes could be one reason behind their enduring global popularity. Since mainstream consumers are in- creasingly cooking their favourite eth- nic dishes at home instead of eating out, EE asked chef Cyrus Todiwala, who runs several successful Indian restau- rants in the UK including Cafe Spice Namaste, why Indian cuisine still continues to be so popular in Britain despite the recent tasty arrivals from other cultures. Todiwala said: “Indian food has sur- vived more, I think, because maybe there is a British connection with it. But at the same time, Indian food is vast. It is not narrowed down into just a few dishes and... many more tradition- al and regional Indian foods are being made. That gives Indian food an extra level of acceptability. “The British public is also travelling more wide- ly now and their palates are getting more discern- ing. And, of course, a lot of them go to India when they travel.” Encouraged by the number of online cookery demos, books and TV shows, more and more UK consumers are dabbling with sauces and brands in a bid to better emulate the authentic fare they eat at restaurants and abroad. Harry Dulai, managing director of Surya Foods, believes convenience is creeping into the ethnic market more and more, and taking over from cook- ing from stratch. Authentic brands from food producers mean consumers can finally source the kind of ready-made sauces they want. He cites Surya’s Laila Indian pastes collec- tion as one which is doing well – the range includes the brands Laila garam masala paste, Laila mild curry paste and Laila tikka paste that go into some of Surya’s bestselling dishes. Convenience products will certainly be helpful with the start of the Muslim holy month of Ramadan this week. Many families will be preparing lots of curries and comfort foods like dhal lentil dishes, according to Todiwala. Cooked simply and finished off with a bit of cumin, garlic and chilli, the fla- vours of these side dishes go well with the rice that traditionally gives peo- ple their energy back af- ter a long day’s fasting. Speciality rice seller Amira is also getting ready for a rush on its Superior Aromatic and Pure Bas- mati products. Conceived as a gourmet Basmati rice range, the Amira brands were launched in the UK in 2013 and have been a hit with consumers across the country. Amira has seen its rice products stocked nation- wide across the main su- permarkets, including Tes- co, Asda, Waitrose and Morri- sons. The Amira Superior Aromatic product offers a grain that is aged for one year before being processed, and which expands up to two and-a-half times in length when cooked, making it perfect rice dish for a hungry family settling down to dinner this summer. POPULARITY OF ETHNIC FOOD INFLUENCES SHOPPING HABITS CONNECTIONS: Curry is an enduring favourite; and Amira (below left) and Laila (below) offer a range of convenience foods CYRUS TODIWALA tells Eastern Eye about the spices and condiments all budding cooks need in their kitchen to try Indian cuisine. What would be the basic spices and condi- ments that you would keep in your kitchen? I would have cinnamon, cardamom, pepper- corns, cloves and nutmeg. These are things everyone has, there is nothing different here from the average English spice rack. But then on the condiment side of things, you should have coriander, cumin, chilli and turmeric powders and cumin seeds. With these spices and condiments, you have a small but very versatile range that you can extend into maybe 50 or 60 dishes. When you are cooking traditional Indian dish- es, what are your favourite spices to use? My favourite spice is cardamom. It has a clean, clear taste that blends across a lot of food. I like it for its complexity as well as the flexibili- ty it delivers. It has the ability to hide and at the same time, shout. It works nicely across the spectrum and is not harsh on the palate. It also is an accepted spice for European palates. What about your favourite condiment? Cumin, without a doubt; it has a robust flavour I love, a unique flavour that gets your tastebuds tingling straight away. It is very aromatic and has a great flavour that works extremely well with rice, in curries, in a lot of other dishes. Which recipes would you recommend to our readers then? I always tell people to keep it simple. The things they should always start with are those they find easiest to cook and then move up. Read a new recipe like you would a novel; read it, put it down and let it mature in your mind. A good place for beginners to start is the BBC website. You can download about 20 recipes I have put up there myself, but there are lots of choices. Nobody has to buy half a supermarket to keep in their house. To start cooking you need five or six basic spices or condiments to cook with, half of which are already present in most English homes. With a group of 10, you have the whole world at your feet. On the rack with Cyrus Todiwala KEEPING IT SIMPLE: Cyrus Todiwala
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Feature12 June 19, 2015 • www.easterneye.eu • Like us on www.facebook.com/easterneye
World of flavours in Britainby NEIL THOMPSON
THE rise of cheap international flights and a multicultural society have tur-ned Britain into a nation of cosmopoli-tan foodies over the past few decades.
The American pizza is just one in a long menu of recipes that have come to the UK down the years. It has been joined by Indian, Oriental, African and Eastern European cooking as relatively new cuisines join older ones in travel-ling from overseas to the tables of our restaurants and the shelves of our su-permarkets.
Eastern Eye looks at the popularity of foreign cuisines in the UK and how they are influencing our shopping and entertainment habits.
The category of ‘world foods’ or eth-nic minority cuisines that have gone on to revolutionise mainstream na-tional tastes can be divided into rough-ly six sub-cuisines – Chinese/Oriental, Indian, Mexican/Tex-Mex, Thai, Carib-bean and others (including Italian, French and Polish), with Indian and Chinese products being the longest established and most popular.
Experts estimate that the overall val-ue of the UK market for ethnic cuisine is £1.6 billion, split between three sec-tors – foods, rice and drinks (divided between soft drinks and alcoholic bev-erages). Research shows that despite the growth of innovative new sectors such as Polish or Mexican food, British consumer appetites are still being wetted by the bold, fresh and tasteful approaches being brought to market by the purveyors of tradi-tional Indian cuisine.
To many people around the world, Indian food just tastes really good. About 76 per cent of UK adults enjoy Indian food according to research an-alyst TNS, but it now seems that an important part of the cuisine’s global success is its unique chemistry. After looking at more than 2,000 Indian recipes, scien-tists have now found that Indian food flavours are prepared radically differ-ently to Western ones. Whereas West-ern dishes are frequently prepared with overlapping flavours, many Indian rec-ipes contain ingredients whose fla-vours do not.
The Indian Institute of Technology in Jodhpur, Rajasthan, researched data on the recipes from a popular Indian cooking site, tarladalal.com. Each dish was broken down to its basic ingredi-ents and compared with others to see how often and how heavily its ingredi-ents shared flavour compounds.
The result was that flavour sharing in Indian cuisine was significantly lower than researchers had expected. Compared to Western cuisine, Indian dishes used many spic-es with flavours that have no common chemical ground.
This seems to be tied to the use of specific ingredients used frequently in Indian cooking, namely cayenne. This spice is the basis of the curry powders found in almost every Indian curry in existence. As a spice, cayenne is dis-tinctive and does not blend with other types of flavours. The same is true of other common ingredients in Indian food green like bell peppers, coriander and garam masala.
The average Indian dish contains at
least seven ingredients, with each of the spices uniquely placed in its recipe to shape the flavour-sharing pattern with the rest of the ingredients, the re-searchers found. Mixing Western foods like milk, butter, bread and rice, on the other hand, yielded flavour pairings which matched each other in contrast to the Indian flavour spectrum. The sharp distinctions between flavours in Indian recipes could be one reason behind their enduring global popularity.
Since mainstream consumers are in-creasingly cooking their favourite eth-nic dishes at home instead of eating out, EE asked chef Cyrus Todiwala, who runs several successful Indian restau-rants in the UK including Cafe Spice
Namaste, why Indian cuisine still continues to be so popular in Britain despite the recent tasty arrivals from other cultures.
Todiwala said: “Indian food has sur-vived more, I think, because maybe there is a British connection with it. But at the same time, Indian food is vast. It is not narrowed down into just a few dishes and... many more tradition-al and regional Indian foods are being made. That gives Indian food an extra level of acceptability.
“The British public is also travelling more wide-ly now and their palates are getting more discern-ing. And, of course, a lot of them go to India when they travel.”
Encouraged by the number of online cookery demos, books and TV shows, more and more UK consumers are dabbling with sauces and brands in a bid to better emulate the authentic fare they eat at restaurants and abroad.
Harry Dulai, managing director of Surya Foods, believes convenience is creeping into the ethnic market more and more, and taking over from cook-ing from stratch. Authentic brands from food producers mean consumers can finally source the kind of ready-made sauces they want. He cites Surya’s Laila Indian pastes collec-tion as one which is doing well – the range includes the brands Laila garam masala paste, Laila mild curry paste
and Laila tikka paste that go into some of Surya’s bestselling dishes.
Convenience products will certainly be helpful with the start of the Muslim holy month of Ramadan this week. Many families will be preparing lots of curries and comfort foods like dhal lentil dishes, according to Todiwala.
Cooked simply and finished off with a bit of cumin, garlic and chilli, the fla-vours of these side dishes
go well with the rice that traditionally gives peo-ple their energy back af-
ter a long day’s fasting. Speciality rice seller
Amira is also getting ready for a rush on its Superior Aromatic and Pure Bas-mati products. Conceived as a gourmet Basmati rice range, the Amira brands were launched in the UK in 2013 and have been a hit with consumers across the country.
Amira has seen its rice products stocked nation-
wide across the main su-permarkets, including Tes-
co, Asda, Waitrose and Morri-sons. The Amira Superior Aromatic product offers a grain that is aged for one year before being processed, and which expands up to two and-a-half times in length when cooked, making it perfect rice dish for a hungry family settling down to dinner this summer.
POPULARITY OF ETHNIC FOOD INFLUENCES SHOPPING HABITS
CONNECTIONS: Curry is an enduring favourite; and Amira (below left) and Laila (below) offer a range of convenience foods
CYRUS TODIWALA tells Eastern Eye about the spices and condiments all budding cooks need in their kitchen to try Indian cuisine.
What would be the basic spices and condi-ments that you would keep in your kitchen?I would have cinnamon, cardamom, pepper-corns, cloves and nutmeg. These are things everyone has, there is nothing different here from the average English spice rack. But then on the condiment side of things, you should have coriander, cumin, chilli and turmeric powders and cumin seeds.
With these spices and condiments, you have a small but very versatile range that you can extend into maybe 50 or 60 dishes.
When you are cooking traditional Indian dish-es, what are your favourite spices to use?My favourite spice is cardamom. It has a clean, clear taste that blends across a lot of food. I like it for its complexity as well as the flexibili-ty it delivers. It has the ability to hide and at the same time, shout. It works nicely across the spectrum and is not harsh on the palate. It also is an accepted spice for European palates.
What about your favourite condiment?Cumin, without a doubt; it has a robust flavour I love, a unique flavour that gets your tastebuds tingling straight away. It is very aromatic and has a great flavour that works extremely well with rice, in curries, in a lot of other dishes.
Which recipes would you recommend to our readers then?I always tell people to keep it simple. The things they should always start with are those they find easiest to cook and then move up. Read a new recipe like you would a novel; read it, put it down and let it mature in your mind. A good place for beginners to start is the BBC website. You can download about 20 recipes I have put up there myself, but there are lots of choices. Nobody has to buy half a supermarket to keep in their house. To start cooking you need five or six basic spices or condiments to cook with, half of which are already present in most English homes. With a group of 10, you have the whole world at your feet.
On the rack with Cyrus TodiwalaKEEPING IT SIMPLE: Cyrus Todiwala
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