Kenji's Cooking Show | Keema Matar

hey where this is Kenji today we're gonna make some keema matar I've already called keema mutter or much of keema I'm not really sure which is correct but I think it doesn't really matter and so this is ground meat ground meat and peas a dish from the Indian subcontinent it's actually like from way back in the 16th century around them like the Mogul Empire this was a edition of the Mughal Empire oh so in here I've got cumin seeds coriander seeds and black cardamom I'm grinding them up in the mortar and pestle you can use pre-ground if you want I just happen to have these spices so I'm grinding them up the difference between pre ground and grinding yourself is that generally when you grind yourself it'll have more flavor because whole spices don't lose their flavor as fast as pre ground spices do and so you know the reason is because there there are volatiles and spices that break down and jump off the spice over time and the more surface area you have exposed to the air the faster that breaks down and the faster the flavor leaves so ground spices just tend to lose their flavour faster than whole spices do so I buy most of our spices whole in bulk from the Indian market generally or online and I go from there so this dish you can make it with any kind of mince paint you want really but I just happen to have beef and pork so they're two very sort of non traditional options here but it's what I had more common would be goat or lamb but again you can do with it whatever you want turkey you could do chicken you can do beef you can do pork what we're doing is we're gonna add actually some water to the ground meat which seems like a weird thing to do but the reason you do this is because it helps you cook the meat and get a sort of smooth consistency generally with this dish you don't want it to have sort of chunks of meat that's stuck together you really want the meat to have sort of a smooth almost sauce-like consistency this is actually a technique I first became aware of when I was researching chili for hot dogs you look at the kind of chili that you like saucy chili that you put on hot dogs Greek chili sometimes it's called a fuel-air from Cincinnati or from Cincinnati I don't know if I don't remember somewhere there's areas where they call it grief chili but it's a sort of saucy hot dog chili and so I found a lot of recipes that called for adding ground meat directly to water and then bring it to a simmer so that use well well sort of stirring so that you get a really smooth sauce like consistency and then to my surprise turns out that that is a very common technique for keema motor as well so typically you would use clarified butter for this I'm not gonna clarify my butter I'm just gonna use straight-up butter I don't I don't really see a reason to clarify but if my butter ghee make ghee for this so I don't in fact very frequently when a recipe tells me to clarify butter I just ignore it the only times you really needed are your like searing high heat and you don't want any kind of browned milk solids then you can clarify your butter but in this case we're sort of going to be sauteing some spices as well as some other things so we got our meat there let's say these little chunks of ginger so I'm gonna do that about this much ginger just take off the skin you can use a spoon also to just scrape off the skin I'm just doing it with a knife this knife is actually probably the oldest knife in my collection this is a a wood stove paring paring knife oh you know what actually it's not the oldest knife in my collection it is definitely one of the oldest knives but the oldest type in my collection was a was tough paring knife that was one of the first knives I ever bought myself because I you know because I was I could barely afford it and carrying that are relatively expensive it was one of the oldest was one of the first times I ever got but like all paring knives do it got lost slash stolen slashed misplaced somewhere in a restaurant I was working at I've never known a line cook who's managed to keep their paring knife through their whole career so I replaced that so this is not this is the replacement knife which is the oldest knife in my collection so little brown butter I don't mind those ground solids in a dish like this let that butter go and now we're gonna add to it some star anis one pod a cup of bay leaves half a cinnamon stick and some cloves these are the spices that are kind of well the star anis the cinnamon and the cloves are kind of very powerful spices that I don't want to add ground because they would they would sort of overwhelm all the other flavors in here but they will sort of impart their perfume to the butter and then we can sort of take either take them out or just help you know I'll just tell Audrey and Alecia to not eat them if they happen to get them in their Bowl and the bay leaves the bay leaves I just do hold because they don't really work out ground I suppose they do I have seen some dishes where you grind up the leaves but they definitely can't grind them in the mortar pestle very easily so I'm gonna leave them in whole so that we can just avoid them when we're eating later and yes bay leaves do add flavor to a dish it's a very common question I get on the internet like what's the point of bay leaves do they really add anything to a dish they do you know it's not one of those flavors that when you taste a dish you're like ooh that's bay leaf but if it wasn't there you would notice that there's a little bit less complexity a little bit so Bailey's the flavour main flavor of them is sort of like a menthol e eucalyptus type aroma and so you know some Bailey your fresh bay leaves especially California Bay tend to have a lot more of that aroma going on then dried turkish bay leaves or these ones are indian bay leaves which have a more subtle subtle flavor and less of that menthol enos but if you taste something made with bay leaves side by side with say made without you definitely notice that the one with bay leaves has sort of an added dimension to him so yes bay leaves do off or something so we're gonna make a garlic and under paste here and the mortar and pestle nor look ginger paces like a very sort of start to many many a curry garlic ginger and onions I just what we're gonna do here actually let me get the onion going first because that's something a little bit longer than the garlic ginger face tool by the way as far as spices go in here if you look up recipes for keema mutter they those spicing varies sort of wildly you know as written in most curries the spicing will vary wildly and you know so depending on who you ask it'll have a different less list of spices to use you know with some of the same sort of basic staples so always cumin coriander garlic and ginger but as far as like a lot of the other things go it's largely option you know largely optional or love to your own personal taste as long as you're not bringing in something crazy they're like I like mango powder you wouldn't want to put in a dish like this but you know you could use fenugreek you could use if you just want to go straight up like a jar of garam masala or let you something like this like a jar of Madras curry powder you can use you can use that right and it'll taste if it tastes good to you it's fine um you know and sometimes I do do that if I'm feeling like I don't want to bust out all my real spices I'll go ahead and I'll just use a spice blend in fact on the side here I'm gonna make a separate dish I had these potatoes left over from I boiled a bunch of potatoes fingerling potatoes or small new potatoes that we then grilled into a potato salad I can put a link for my grilled potato salad recipe in the description below we grill them for a potato salad the other night and I had a bunch leftover that were parboiled so today I'm going to stir fry them with them what I've got is this Glen of cumin and fried cumin and mustard seeds that have been mixed with a Madras curry powder and that's the same spice blend that we use for the curry versed in our at my restaurant which is a very traditional German curry versed is sort of like a curry spice ketchup on french fries and and a sausage what we do is we make is sort of a blackened ginger curry sauce that sort of ketchupy in appearance but is much sort of more complex in flavor a little more bitter more fresh spices and when we dust it off with that fried that fried cumin black mustard seed and cilantro mixture that's what we just evolved it I think it's very good all right so we're gonna let that fry for a little bit we're gonna pound this into a paste a little lie some salt to our onions it'll help them cook a little faster and we'll have some salt to her [Music] paste your salt a kind of a magic ingredient so when you're when you're pounding things like this it kind of acts as an abrasive so it helps break down cells and also through osmosis draws moisture out of cells so it helps basically the vegetables break down much more easily the plant cells break down more easily and when you're frying it does a similar thing it pulls liquid out from inside the cells which causes them to sort of collapse which makes them fry a little faster spices smell really good oh you know I'm gonna do I'm gonna take taking a few photographs because this is actually a recipe that's going to appear in my my book that I'm working on and we're gonna book on cooking in a wok and this recipe will appear in there I mean I haven't taken the photographs for yet so sorry I got this kind of old looking Serrano chili that I'm also gonna use and actually I might my daughters daughters generally okay with heat but I know this guy from taco video that I've made the other night I know this guy's really spicy so I'm gonna get rid of some of the seeds as you probably know most of the spice the capsaicin that the oil that triggers our that pain reaction of the hot food pain reaction on our tongue yeah this one is I can feel it on my throat already just through the air most of that capsaicin is located in the ribs and the seeds so if you get rid of them your chili will be less spicy people ask me about knives that you know I'll start talking about my equipment as I go through this particular knife I really enjoy it is can can core is the is the brand it's a 67 layer Damascus steel it is a relatively small new knife company maybe a couple years old it is the knife that we give to all of our cooks after they hit their one-year anniversary at our restaurant at my restaurant and I don't know the owner personally this is not product placement or an ad by the way I don't know the owner of the company personally but I have interacted with hit with him online just because he's seen me use his knives and we've talked about his knives and he is a highly dedicated lovely guy and I would very strongly recommend the knives I'm especially because I think from all the testimonials from other people out here cost and my own experience I'm dealing with him the customer care of the brand is really great as well he kind of personally interacts with everybody who buys his knife which is rare these days you know but to this the ground spices I'm also going to add a bit teaspoon reserved turmeric ground turmeric and this which is uh I was at the Leiden grocer today down the street from me and they they had this ground chili California and I like chili California so I'm just gonna add some of that to not what I normally do but you're doing it this time all right so we're looking for the onion to get nice and dark brown like that it's looking good and I'm gonna add my spice mix or my chili garlic garlic garlic ginger paste as well as that chili hopefully SIA isn't a heat-tolerant mood today because I think this is gonna be pretty spicy [Music] [Music] hmmm smells good okay that piece is fraying maybe my you have a cleaner my little photo here [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] it's been good so one of the things that you'll notice when you're frying wet ingredients sound like that chili paste or the onions um is that when you first put them in that kind of steam you know and they have this kind of like the certain noise that they make like it kind of like a Shh sound and then as this as the water starts to evaporate off and it transitions from steaming to actually frying and crisping and browning you get this sort of more like a crackly like the sound of frying and that's you know that's one of those times when you really want to use your ears to tell if something tell when something is done is ready for the next step the other one and in this case is a sort of visual cue where when you see the oil kind of start breaking out I don't know if you can see that but when you see the oil kind of start breaking out of the of the solids that's a sign that most of your moisture has been evaporated and that you're in sort of frying mode now that's what I'm gonna add my other spices which are Pete that was turmeric ground chili in this case just chili California turmeric ground chili ground cardamom this one I used black carbon you can use black or green or a combination Blanc ground cardamom ground coriander and ground cumin seed [Music] here's a strike tip I have defrosting for another project yeah New York Times article last week I put out an article New York Times that showed you how to basically roast an inexpensive cut of meat and then store that roast the already cut already cooked roast in the freezer and use it to make a whole bunch of different meals later on down the line so I'm gonna be sort of demoing all those in some upcoming recipes so keep an eye out for that all right so now I'm gonna take my tomato I'm just gonna grate it through the large holes of a box grater here since I think the easiest technique to get the flesh out of a tomato when you're making us a sauce because basically leaves all the skin behind and it kind of pre chops the tomato free sauces the tomato for you say you need to have two soft top you neither have to cut it nor peel it or blanch it or anything super convenient method and the skin kind of acts as a protective glove for you see all better right tomato in there that smells great all right now finally we're gonna go in with our meat meat and water mixture here maybe we need a little more water okay now we're just gonna let this kind of simmer down for a while picture [Music] um I'll put a lid on it too cuz I'm gonna jump outside it works alright and I'm going to run outside and we're going to I've had the pizza oven preheating so we're gonna bake some non you right is better I will add to my race this is supposedly basmati rice Lundberg the brand from North Carolina this is supposedly buzz mighty rice but it does not look like any basmati rice I've ever had this looks just sort of like a regular old Carolina medium green well long green ray sort of tastes like also definitely doesn't have any of that gonna age basmati flavor and as much shorter greens than most basmati that said it's still gonna taste good hmm especially not too spicy Lenya flavor take our cilantro so you throw it down wipe go down this what you do if you don't want to use paper towels to dry your herbs or a salad spinner you know we just have a small amount of herbs like that sitting in water either because you rinse them or because you wanted a fresh them up come up and slam them down I will do all these dishes later actually tonight might be Audrey's turn to do the dishes so I drew if I do the dishes later I know people talk about like I've heard often heard commenters say oh you have so many dishes to do it's like it's not really that many and most of them are relatively clean you know it's like most of them are just a real quick easy easy job to do I mean I could blow through those dishes and five minutes Audrey will probably take four minutes to do them if you can't really devote four minutes to cleaning up after yourself after dinner then I don't know I say you deserve what you eat just get this into a bowl I got these beautiful little copper copper and steel serving bowl that I bought at an Indian market I think they're lovely I was like I'm a kind of I'm a I'm an appreciator and a collector of service ware and I really looked I really enjoy a nice looking plate all right starting to get nice and rich here the very end we're going to shake in just a touch of garam masala just store-bought garam masala [Music] [Applause] so the point of this garam masala at the end is that which often find with many curries and you know do cuisines that rely on a lot of dry spices is that you'll add the spices in sort of multiple phases so you might fry some bloom in the oil at the beginning which is what I did here you saw me add the spice and bloomed them the oil are in the butter at least and what that does is it you know it extracts some of those sort of flavor the fat-soluble flavor compounds from there and the high heat of the fat we know that it was high heat because it was not the what the onions and garlic and and chilies and ginger were not steaming anymore there is sizzling which means that the oil was getting up there above you know well above the boiling point of water and probably closer to more like 300 350 degrees so at that temperature you're also going to be triggering chemical reactions that are going to add complexity and when I say add complexity I mean like literal measurable complexity you're taking a certain set of chemical compounds you're applying it to them and then it triggers this cascade of reactions that where you end up with many many more new compounds as sort of you can sort of think of it as it's like if I have a a Lego spaceship which is my main spice right my cardamom is a Lego spaceship and then a heat is like my toddler coming through and wrecking it and then what she does then after that she reassembles it into 50 different new smaller things that you know so so basically you end up with you start out with one big thing in every and it gets reassembled into many many different smaller things by the three-year-old toddler that is heat that's the same you know same thing that happens with like caramelization that may are we actually know the Browning reaction anytime yeah all right anytime you're heating food that's what's going on so those are just fresh fresh raw peas that are from the show just out of the shell you can use you can use a frozen peas frozen peas work great for this these are one of those vegetables that are almost better frozen because unless you can get your fresh peas really really fresh like straight from the farmers market and you use them using them up quickly like these came for the farmers market two days ago unless you're using it real quickly they will start to get super starchy and lose their sweetness whereas frozen peas are frozen and while there's sort of a peak sweetness which is why frozen peas tend to be sweeter and more flavorful frequently than fresh peas - unless you get really good fresh Peas but yeah so frozen peas if you're gonna if you're gonna use frozen peas put them in a strainer and run them under hot water just to defrost them before you add them in here or don't you know just throw them in frozen and let it give it a few minutes and they'll defrost is fine or microwave them any number of ways you can anyway number ways you can incorporate them but that last thing I was going to do let's do potatoes those potatoes so I'm gonna actually that transfers out to uh another pot so that I can fry my potatoes in here mommy's we're about this is a carbon steel wok if you care for it basically the same way you would treat cast iron so don't leave it wet but you can always you can always feel free to wash it with soap and water that's not going to strip the seasoning there's my garam masala going in the only thing you don't wanna do is leave it sitting around wet because that might cause it to cause it to rust all right so these are simply potatoes that have been parboiled pull and then cut into quarters so par boiled in salted water hmm those are good good good good piece you could do we could do better here I'm just gonna use olive oil but I want to know if any more butter so we're gonna take our hard boiled potatoes gonna fry just a bit you can let them get as crispy or not as you want for this particular dish I don't think they really have to be super crispy per se you know I kind of just like them soft and coat it in a flavorful oil or favorite flavor full fat so we're gonna go in there with these so the way you can make this stuff is you take whole cumin seeds whole black mustard seeds and you just fry them in Fryman oil until they start to kind of sputter and pop and then take it out drain the oil off them on paper towels and then cool it down and then toss it with some curry powder [Music] I just use modular style store bought modular style turn cutter [Music] all right Adric dinner in like two minutes [Music] not a sham [Music] [Music] these potatoes dip them in yogurt I think that's delicious or squeeze a little citrus on top of them you ever want to get all that hand crunch cheese out [Applause] that is done and get a spoon for that that's the food and this is the big spoon we're gonna use it as a serving spoon I like to throw some of the whole spices in there just remind people that they're there just show people hey look what look at the work that went into this look at the work something I learned in high school always show your work especially in cooking because the more work people think was done to something the more the more likely they are to like it that's it it's a pro tip in fact the more work you can get someone to do in a recipe the more likely they are to think it's great themselves that's why I like I have a chili recipe that has like 40 ingredients and takes seven days to do it's all that it's like us like Stockholm Syndrome you're been kidnapped by the recipe [Applause] [Music] let's eat well let me grab a little fork so I can do my customary by the window taste hmm reminds me of my mother's this reminds me of my mother's mother I love those guys here you go sit good girl all right see you later dinnertime

Channel: J. Kenji López-Alt

Views: 274,639

Rating: 4.924706 out of 5

Keywords:

Id: z3zs76WmYdk

Length: 32min 1sec (1921 seconds)

Published: Mon May 11 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/J_Kenji_Lopez-Alt]

Keema matar is a classic Mughal dish popular all over the Indian subcontinent. It's typically made with ground lamb or goat cooked with peas, but today I had pork and beef so that's what I used. I also mixed some fava beans in with the peas. It's delicious and a good place to dip your toes into the wonderful world of spices and South Asian curries.

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Here I also pair it with homemade naan (I'll put up a video for that separately at some point) and potatoes cooked with spices that, since in the process of editing this video, I realize are similar to a thing called "Bombay Potatoes," which I will now go and obsessively look up, as is custom.

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Recipe:

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Equipment:

Spice grinder or mortar and pestle

Assorted bowls

A wok or Dutch oven

A wooden spoon

A box grater

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Ingredients:

1 pound ground meat (such as lamb or beef)

1 cup water

4 tablespoons butter

1 large onion, finely diced

1 small cinnamon stick

1 star anise pod

2 bay leaves

Salt

4 cloves garlic

1 (2-inch) knob of ginger, peeled and cut into disks

1 small hot pepper, such as Serrano or japlapeño, finely minced

1 tablespoon freshly ground cumin seed

2 teaspoons freshly ground coriander seed

1 teaspoon turmeric

1 teaspoon ground dried chili (such as kashmiri powder, or any other spicy chili powder you'd like, or not spicy if you don't want spice)

1 large beefsteak tomato, cut in half

1/2 pound shelled fresh peas or frozen peas, thawed

Big handful chopped fresh cilantro

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1. Combine the meat and water in a bowl and squeeze with your fingers to make a kinda loose meat sludge. Wash your hands and set the meat aside.

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1. Heat butter in a wok or Dutch oven until melted. Add the onion, cinnamon stick, star anise pod, and bay leaves and cook over medium-high heat, stirring, until onion is deeply browned, about 10 minutes. Add garlic, ginger, and minced hot pepper and cook, stirring, until fragrant, about 1 minute. Add the ground spices and cook, stirring, until fragrant, about 30 seconds.

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1. Hold the cut-side of one tomato half against the large holes of a box grater with the open palm of your hand against its skin. Grate the tomato directly into the wok, leaving the skin behind. Stir the wok, then add the meat/water mixture and stir again.

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1. Cook, covered, until the sauce has reduced to a rich gravy, about 12 minutes. Stir in peas and cook for a minute longer, then stir in the cilantro. Serve.

[u/ScienceWorshipper]

Kenji, thank you so much for these awesome videos! Seeing how you cook in your home kitchen, sharing techniques and showing how you improvise based on what you have on hand has really helped me to improve my own cooking skills. I have always loved to cook but it has also often felt daunting to me. Your videos have helped me get past that and just get into the kitchen and start cooking. Thanks again!

[u/badassite]

Kenjiiiii! awesome recipe! I'm stuck in Sweden with no good spices. Have you tried lutfisk or surströming before?

[u/joojifish]

Made this for dinner today using ground pork, it was delicious. Added some diced Yukon gold potatoes.