Vikas Khanna's 'Amritsar- Flavours of the Golden City' put to the test

You open the book and it feels like Punjab,” says pâtissier Pooja Dhingra of Le 15 Patisserie about chef Vikas Khanna’s latest cookbook. Launched in India with tremendous pomp, Amritsar- Flavours of the Golden City is a book that combines the city’s history, nuances of the Punjabi community, religious spots and recipes into one bind.

We chose the baker to live-test two recipes for several reasons. For starters, though Dhingra is adept at making macaroons and cupcakes, when it comes to Indian cooking, she can’t tell between her sabut mirchi and laal mirchi powder. Secondly, being born in a true-blue Punjabi family, she can tell a good kali dal from a bad one. This made her the perfect candidate to review Khanna’s cookbook.
Before we arrived at Dhingra’s test kitchen, Studio Fifteen, where chefs from around the country (and occasionally even Parisians) come to teach baking, cooking and all things culinary, the 28-year-old baker had short-listed two recipes that she wanted to try from the cookbook.

“I’m a huge fan of soups. So, first we will try the paneer shorba,” she tell us enthusiastically. In Indian cuisine, shorba is the equivalent of soups and the recipe in question calls for five basic ingredients, easily found in any Indian kitchen. Dhingra starts by assembling butter, milk, onions, salt and pepper and places them on her sparkling clean kitchen table. “While you can use store-bought cottage cheese to make this shorba, I’ll be making my own. This should make my naani proud,” she says. Dhingra starts off by pouring three brimming cups of whole milk in a soup pot. To it, she adds juice of half a lemon and patiently watches as the dairy curdles, leaving behind trails of splotchy paneer granules. The cottage cheese is then strained and the whey is kept aside to make the base for the soup.

Like a thorough culinary student, Dhingra constantly keeps returning to the recipe, making sure she doesn’t miss a step or gets the proportions wrong. “The next step is similar to making French onion soup. I made a lot of it when I was a student in Paris,” says Dhingra.
She melts generous spoons of silken butter in a pan. She then adds slices of finely chopped onions and continues to stir them until the room begins to fill with the aroma of sweet, caramelised onions. The sizzle of the onions is punctuated with the addition of leftover whey liquid and she allows the broth to bubble as she prepares to make the second recipe — butter chicken.

For any Punjabi home, a butter chicken recipe is almost sacrosanct. “My mother has her own version. This one is more restaurant-style. My family recipe is homely,” says Dhingra as she skims through the recipe. She starts making the murg makhani by marinating cubed pieces of the bird in a thick coating of cold, whisked yogurt, spices and fragrant kasoori methi.
Left for a few hours to stand, the cubes are then laid on a foil sheet and popped into the oven to blast on high temperature. “In the meantime, we can start cooking the gravy by sauteing onions and tomatoes in clarified butter and bay leaves,” intones Dhingra.

Once done, the saute is pulverised in a blender until a thick and tangy gravy emerges out of the blender jar. Since Indian tomatoes are mostly tart, the gravy is well-spiced and smooth but has a sharp tang. To mellow it down, Dhingra carefully tips in pre-measured cups of cashewnut paste, cream and butter, mixing it vigorously to hide all traces of fat. She plonks the oven-cooked chicken pieces in this saffron pool and puts it all to simmer on a slow flame for a few minutes.

By this time, the soupy-broth of the panner shorba has bubbled just right. “Let’s serve it in cutting chai glasses instead of soup bowls,” suggests Dhingra. She perches a spoonful of fresh cottage cheese in each of the two glasses and pours out the brown, clear soup with floating bits of caramelised onions, which is ready to be slurped.
For final touches to the murg makhani, Dhingra sprinkles it with chopped coriander leaves and dollops in some cream. “Oh-my-God, let’s Instagram this!” she exclaims. “This is the first time I’ve made butter chicken.”