The power of four in the kitchen

Each of these kitchen superheroes is a shapeshifter, capable of changing its entire personality and taste profile depending on how you chop it, how long you cook it, at what temperature and in what oil...

It was a simple question: Which four ingredients work the hardest in the Indian kitchen?

Let me be clearer. You may put pretty much anything under the heading ‘Ingredients' - vegetables, spices, oils, condiments, even oils, if you must. Think slowly and carefully. I'm not asking for the most commonly used or the most popular ingredients but the heavy lifters. These ingredients on their own can bring an entire entree to life. Even more, those who taste them will swear you're a magician, not a chef.

When I asked this question at a party yesterday, answers included turmeric, cumin, coriander, salt, ghee and hing. All wrong. These are popular, commonly used, but not muscular. They cannot lift a dish out of ordinariness.

In my humble opinion, there are only four superheroes in our kitchens and they are tomatoes, onions, ginger and garlic. Don't think of them as one thing. Each is a shapeshifter, capable of changing its entire personality and taste profile depending on how you chop it, how long you cook it, at what temperature and in what oil, when you stop cooking it and what you add to it while it's cooking.

Three of them are roots and the fourth is a fruit, believe it or not. We love the onion precisely because of what makes it repellent - four pungent sulfurous compounds fortunately locked away within its cells. The enzyme that liberates them is held separately - till the moment you damage the onion by cutting, pounding or pureeing it. The enzyme breaks out and in turn sets those pungent sulfur compounds free to evolve as they meet air, oil, heat and other influences. (One of them, called the ‘lacrimator', directly attacks nerve endings in your eyes, driving you to stinging tears.)

Onions and garlics, of the allium family, store their energy in long chains of fructose - but something delicious happens when you cook them slowly on medium heat - the fructose breaks down and suddenly your bulb is not nasty but sweet. Then, as the edges start to brown and gold starts appearing, the sweet becomes savoury, almost meaty.

Cook it further and the sugar starts caramelising, creating eventually a crisp chocolatey bitterness whose natural home is a French Onion soup.

Garlic, with a hundred times more sulfurous bullets than the onion, has less water and more fructose, which means a little bit goes a long way. Try this for fun - microwave a whole head of garlic, drizzled with olive oil and a little salt, for 8-9 minutes. The garlic will become a deliciously sweet, jam-like mush that you can spread on a warm buttered toast and serve to a king.

About tomatoes, three factoids. They are actually fruits; they are in the same family as capsicums and eggplants. And, like onions, they contain sulfurous compounds, though better bred because you'll smell them only when the tomato finally rots, releasing the foulest fumes. When you blanch the thin skin off the tomatoes, you're losing most of its flavour, so don't. As it cooks, the tomato develops lycopene, that ketchup compound. Its glutamic acid, like MSG, comes to the fore, adding sweetness, acidity and flavour to the food.

Imagine cooking this taste-maker with gently browning onion, and blending them to a sauce. You'll have the beginnings of the world's finest rajma.

Bright, refreshing ginger is versatile, bringing aromatic, woody, evergreen notes to sausages, fish and biscuits as easily as sodas and sweet. To understand how ginger fits into this picture, here's a demonstration.

While you're busy working on something of planetary importance, put about 1.5 inches of water to boil, and throw into it the following - one or two juicy red tomatoes cut into quarters or sixths; about an inch of unpeeled ginger cut into rings; 2-3 garlic cloves, smashed with their papery skins; and 2-3 green chillies, bruised a little. Put the heat on low and don't give it another thought.

Before you return to your work, also put about half a cup of washed dal to boil in a pressure cooker, with some turmeric. Any dal will do but tuvar, mung or chana are good choices.

Wake up with a start after 10-15 minutes and check the damage. The ginger-garlic-tomato water should have boiled down, and the dal should be nice done. Add the one to the other, throw in some salt and add hot water till it's as thin as you'd like it. I like it really thin.

Bring it to a boil for a few minutes.

That's it really. You should garnish with half a spoon of black mustard seeds spluttered in a little ghee. Add chopped coriander or squeeze a lime in if you're the type that can't leave well alone. Serve it with rice and ghee and any vegetable you fancy, like fried potatoes.

Tell me it isn't witchcraft.

Here, viewed from there. C Y Gopinath, in Bangkok, throws unique light and shadows on Mumbai, the city that raised him. You can reach him at cygopi@gmail.com
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The views expressed in this column are the individual's and don't represent those of the paper.