Cafe Spice Cookbook

May 25, 2015
Nayak (My Indian Kitchen) was a food industry veteran when he met Shushil Malhotra, the founder of Café Spice, which has blossomed into a $30 million business supplying supermarkets and retail outlets with ready-to-go Indian food. Here, Nayak shows readers how to create their own versions of Café Spice favorites such as potato and pea samosas and chicken tikka masala, as well as Indian-inspired riffs on Western classics like crab cakes and Sloppy Joes. Though his wordy introduction to techniques, tools, and key ingredients may seem daunting to some, readers will find it useful if they're new to Indian cuisine. Once they've got a grasp of key terms and concepts, Nayak moves on to stuffed lamb fritters, a rich cauliflower and curry soup, smoky fire-roasted eggplant, and a home version of tandoori chicken using the oven or grill (as well as some optional red food coloring) to recreate the popular classic. Once readers have stocked their spice racks and assembled a few masalas and chutneys, they'll likely find Nayak's recipes to be straightforward and fairly easy; much of the effort is in assembling the requisite ingredients. Readers well versed in Indian cuisine may find this a little too elementary for their tastes, but novices will likely find this to be a terrifically practical guide to reproducing Indian classics at home.

March 15, 2015
Trained at the Culinary Institute of America, and veteran cook at Swedish and French Manhattan restaurants, Nayak yearns to make Indian cuisine a more everyday option for American home cooks. The diverse range of herbs and spices that distinguishes the subcontinent's food from commonplace American dishes blocks many from pursuing Indian cuisine. Nayak offers a visually enhanced glossary of ingredients and cooking techniques to remove much mystery. He recommends equipment to optimize kitchen efficiency, and he offers more readily available substitutions wherever practical, carefully avoiding superfluous detail that might unnecessarily inhibit beginners. Recipes similarly shun complication. In so immense and diverse a land as India, regional variations occur, and Nayak includes some lesser-known traditions such as the cooking of Goa, where colonial heritage welcomes foods that are taboo in other parts of the nation. Color photographs on facing pages picture what the cook may expect from each recipe.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2015, American Library Association.)