The #1 Cuisine to Master if You’re a Vegetarian

Indian food that's it there's no gimmick here Indian cuisine is the best vegetarian cuisine hands down because 30 percent of India is vegetarian and that is a lot of people considering India has over a billion people so 30 percent of like 1.3 billion people eat vegetarian and they've been eating vegetarian for generations for so long and they have mastered the art of making vegetables taste good which is so important when it comes to vegetarian cooking because you don't want to be making salads you don't want to just be in cheese like you want to take your game up a notch you got to get creative with it and Indian cuisine is where it's at for making those veggies taste incredible and the variety is insane most people think of like the standard curry maybe they've had it at some shitty Indian place no no no when you're talking about traditional Indian food it goes deep and you'll see in this video although these recipes aren't 100% traditional they take traditional Indian cooking techniques to make three different courses all using veggies as the star there's just a few basics that we got to cover right up front when it comes to making Indian food number one you got to get your spice game on point these are my favorite essential Indian spices right here that I use all the time these are whole spices so the seed form obviously you can use ground spices I tend to use more of the whole spice but in Indian cuisine you'll see both in most dishes you'll see it starts off with some of the whole spice then it moves on to ground spice later on in the dish speaking of ground spice number two we've got a little garam masala right here you can go to the store you can get a curry powder or Agra masala powder those are like the two biggest ground powders and basically it's just a mix of what I showed you maybe they're toasted before and ground up but these are great all-purpose spices if you don't want to do with like a hundred different spices you sprinkle a little bit of this in you'll get some essential Indian flavor just make sure you get a good one because you don't want to get stuck with some shitty curry powder that's no good we've got ghee which is probably the most popular cooking fat in India and basically ghee is just clarified butter you can buy this in the store if you want to save money you can just take butter put it on a simmer and what's gonna happen is it's gonna start bubbling like this skim off all that foam on the top and then the solids are gonna form on the bottom so you're just gonna pour the clarified butter off keeping all those solids on the bottom and the amazing part about ghee is those milk fat solids that we just got rid of that's the stuff that burns at high temperatures so now we can use this delicious butter flavor but we can get it up to about 400 degrees in the pan and we don't have to worry about it smoking right when it goes in the pan getting some nasty burnt butter flavor that's out of the picture so get yourself some ghee the last essential for these recipes at least is ginger-garlic paste you'll see this in so many different Indian recipes it's basically just a paste made out of ginger and garlic so they puree it down and it works great because you don't have to sit there chopping up ginger and garlic you just add that pace to your dishes and boom shinnok and you got yourself flavor the first dish we're gonna start out with might be the most traditional because I learned it from my Indian friend who learned it from his parents who probably learned it from their parents so it goes way back and it's a spinach dish and you'll see in India a lot of spinach dishes but they treat spinach a lot differently than we do over in the States you know usually we wilted down for like a minute maybe we blanch it that's not how it works with these dishes they cook the [ __ ] out of spinach they stew it down so if you ever see a saga saag paneer try that out at an Indian restaurant see if you like it it's like a pureed Indian delicious spinach dish we're gonna start off with just coating the bottom of the pan with some of that ghee now we're gonna add in our whole spice and this is called tempering the spices so your base just infusing the oil with the whole spice we've got coriander we've got some cardamom that I just cracked lightly to release some of those seeds inside we've got some cumin seeds once that cooked for about 30 seconds I added some fresh chilli in there and then some onion and then some salt the salt will help Brown those onions a bit and also add just a layer of flavor you really want to cook that on a nice medium heat cook it low and slow to make sure you caramelize all of that goodness right down and then once those onions are looking delicious just like this we're gonna add in our ginger-garlic paste so just give about a spoonful or two of that stuff and the ginger garlic paste will cook very quick because it's a paste so you got to make sure you stir that around so it doesn't burn once that cooks for about a minute we're going in with our spinach and this is gonna look like a ton of spinach but again it's all gonna stew down over about an hour of time just pack in your spinach this is fresh from the farmers market but if you've got bagged spinach just get like two big bags you'll be surprised you need a lot for this dish you can even get some of that frozen stuff too a lot of recipes are actually made with that that's all right in this case I'm gonna add a little bit of water to steam everything up to get it all nice and wilted down and then you're just gonna start cooking that down and really breaking all of that spinach down melding all of those flavours once everything's wilted down we're gonna add a little bit of salt we're gonna add some garam masala and this is a homemade one I made but you can use a store-bought of course and you see this a lot in Indian dishes you start out with the whole spice in the beginning that gives you a nice texture and good flavor and then you sprinkle in some of the powder or really up the spice levels a lot of times I just skip the powder because I don't know Indian spice they really go for it I don't think it's necessary but that's obviously traditional now I actually had some chana dal which is a split chickpea which is very popular in India cuisine but you can use any type of lentil maybe some beans you're gonna add those in right here and then I just added a little bit of water and let that cook for about 30 minutes to 45 minutes until the chana dal is cooked nicely through its tender to the bite and you'll see over time the spinach really breaks down which is what I love about this dish you're not used to eating spinach that was stood down so much but the end result is just fantastic you can call it a SOG I don't know maybe just a Indian spinach stew so the next dish we are shifting gears a little bit I guess you would call this more South Indian cuisine where you see more coconuts cuz this dish has a lot of coconut milk in it but it's pretty much just a coconut curry very basic stuff you can use any vegetable for this dish but we are going to use butternut squash so I started off with some coconut oil instead of ghee I'm using coconut oil because it's gonna mash nicely with the coconut milk then for the dried spices for the tempering I'm gonna add a little bit of coriander I had some fenugreek sprinkle some of that in some cinnamon and then some mustard seeds which you see a lot in Indian cuisine and then I had some dried chilies and I just stirred those around into the oil tempered those up and fuse that goodness until those mustard seeds start to pop and that is basically your indicator that your onions are ready to be added in so I go in with some chopped onions just stir those up on medium heat until they get nice and brown and delicious again in with the ginger garlic paste a scoop or two of that cook that all together for about a minute and then we are gonna add in some chopped butternut squash you can use any type of squash you have and then in with the butternut squash give that a stir around and then I pour it on that creamy coconut and just let that all cook together bring it to a boil just let it infuse all of those delicious flavors [Music] once that's cooked for about I would say five minutes so what I did at this point was I took some fresh tumeric which I had and obviously you can use dried tumeric which you see a lot in Indian cuisine a lot of dried tumeric sprinkled on at this point in the dish it gives it a really nice color and good flavor but I just took the fresh stuff and graded that in I like the flavor of the fresh stuff a little better at this point I actually decided last second to add some sliced mushrooms I just wanted a little extra something in there I thought they would soak up that juice really nicely so I added some fresh chopped mushrooms and then I added a little bit of tamarind paste which is just really nice and tangy you can use lime juice lemon juice any acidity you want but tamarin I thought would work really nice in this dish and just cook that for a few more minutes until it came together and created a beautiful coconut curry and for this dish I felt that I kind of overcooked it a little bit the butternut squash I was working with it was a little smaller I like it when it's a little more tender but feel free to turn it into mush II could puree that whole thing and it'd be delicious so the last main veggie course and maybe my favorite at least the dish that I make the most is this tomato eggplant dish and I've kind of transformed it because you see this dish a lot in Middle Eastern cooking so I've almost fuse the two but you do see a lot of eggplant curries or like eggplant stews eggplant tomato dishes and Indian cooking so let's get after this one the first thing you're gonna do is roast your eggplant and you don't need to do it this way but I find it's really easy to just roll them up and some tinfoil throw them in the oven at about 400 degrees and cook those things for like an hour and a half make sure you go the extra notch if you think they're done I would say cook them for another 30 minutes just to make sure those things come out so soft and gooey to start on the tempering process I got a little bit of ghee in the pan I added some cardamon some cumin seeds I had some green peppercorns here you can use regular peppercorns I just smash those up a little bit of chili and then stirred that around added the onion and then a little bit of salt and just cook that for about 10 minutes you can see a lot of the dishes start off very similar and there is a big trend in Indian cuisine when it comes to curries they start off similar and then they just kind of shoot off into different directions I added my ginger-garlic paste cook that up for about a minute and then I added in chopped tomatoes which I love when it comes to Indian tomato sauces it's so simple they just add in fresh tomatoes to so many of their dishes and it's really changed my cooking I add fresh tomatoes like this to so many dishes now you're gonna see those Tomatoes release a lot of juice so cook that down like you are stewing a tomato sauce it took about 10 minutes to really get it down to a nice point and then what I did was I chopped open those eggplants and scooped out all of that meat you don't want this skin the skin is bitter you want to discard that and just keep the good stuff on the inside and then add all of that you don't even have to chop it up because it's so gooey and that too this tomato sauce and stir that around add in a ton of cilantro and cook that for about another five minutes and that is I guess an Indian and tomato eggplants do I don't know what you would call that maybe someone else knows better but that to me is my favorite type of dish you've got the best of all world it's just Indian tomato sauce is so good it's like I've stopped making regular tomato sauce because you could just add all of these delicious flavorings and then you could add whatever vegetable that you want to that it's one of the easiest ways to make vegetables taste good which is the goal of vegetarian cooking now we've got all of these delicious stew curry type things so of course we need something to eat that with and in Indian cuisine a lot of times they just eat with their hands because they've got some delicious bread whatever they've got so many different types of bread to eat it with we're gonna go with some standard flat breads so last night I actually made some dough I let that rise overnight and it was really simple I just rolled them out into little flat disks and I put it into a cast-iron pan on one side just dry dry on one side and I let that cook for about 3 minutes on medium heat and then I took some of that Ghia again and I just brushed the top and once that really started to bubble up nicely then I flipped it over and cooked it for another 2 or 3 minutes on the other side and you've got delicious flatbread you can't really get better than that you scoop up some of that good stuff right there and you've got yourself an Indian feast and that that's really what it's all about they bring out a bunch of these little curry plates and they have a feast and to me it's like when I figured out good Indian cuisine because believe me there's a lot of [ __ ] most people they honestly from America at least they think of the shitty Indian cuisine unless you know someone that was cooking you good Indian food when you were a kid or you went to some really good restaurants there's a lot of [ __ ] stuff out there it's kind of like Chinese food it just got Americanized at some point but when you look at the traditional stuff if you go to India even over in the UK incredible Indian food just start looking into the techniques start learning some of the basic spices I've covered just some of them in this video but there there's just an endless wealth of knowledge and cooking skills when it comes to Indian food and it's definitely one of my favorites so stop eating stop eating it's just salads I mean salads are good but you got to take your game to the next level you got to start learning how to really make vegetable sing you've got to get creative with it an Indian cuisine is one of the best ways to do that that's it make sure you subscribe to my Instagram feed life by Mike G you'll see me cooking a lot of these types of dishes because honestly I cook like this all the time in my regular life so if you want to see some stories on that and stay up to date make sure you subscribe to that subscribe to brothers green and keep on cooking [Music] [Music]

Channel: Pro Home Cooks

Views: 2,493,608

Keywords: intro to curries, indian cuisine, brothers green, vegetarian for parties, master vegetarian cooking, beginners vegetarian, coconut butternut sqaush, sagg recipe, eggplant tomato curry, the best vegetarian food, indian feast, easy vegetarian, beginners indian, how to cook indian food, mike greenfield, simple flatbreads, enzyme tire spunk, basic curry recipes, vegetarian recipes

Id: h_qsg8Gof4Q

Length: 15min 53sec (953 seconds)

Published: Fri Jan 05 2018

Reddit Comments

[u/goldjade13]

Brother's Green is an excellent YouTube channel for learning to cook too. They learned at a young age because apparently their mother was so bad, heh.

[u/stumpy1991]

My girlfriend is a vegetarian. She just eats junk food.