Sunday Style Brunch At PLUCK & PLING Never Miss a good eventpullman new delhi aerocity We need this information so that we can personalize events based on your interests. You can follow various topics and we will send notifications whenever we find a relevant event. We will not send more than 1 or 2 email per week. Also you can unsubscribe anytime with just one click Log In with Facebook“... went for some and a few more ...”One of Japan’s favourite exports, sushi, is getting a subcontinental makeover, says Rahul Verma That it takes all kinds to make the world hit me forcibly some days ago when I went for a Japanese meal. I love Japanese food, which I think is one of the lightest, tastiest, healthiest and best looking cuisines in the world. I like sushi and sashimi, and everything else from yakitori to teriyaki. This time, though, I was a little hesitant when I went to Sakura, in The Metropolitan Hotel & Spa, New Delhi. I have had some excellent meals in Sakura, which was one of the first Japanese restaurants in a five-star hotel.

But the chef there, Tetsu Akahira, has given a new twist to the traditional sushi: He is doing paneer and tandoori chicken sushis (though, of course, the old favourites are all there). “People ask us for sushi with Indian favours,” chef Akahira points out. “We have chosen the best and most popular snacks from the Indian menu and combined them with Japanese sushi. Tandoori ingredients enhance the flavour of sushi along with sauces such as mint and mayo.” Chef Akahira puts a piece of tandoori chicken in a gunkan, a kind of sushi. His Special Chennai roll is a roll of nori and rice, with a spicy tandoori prawn inside it. And the paneer nigiri sushi is rolled around tandoori paneer. Paneer — possibly because of its distant kinship with tofu — is quite a favourite with these Indo-Japanese sushis. Chef Vaibhav Bhargava of WelcomHotel Sheraton, New Delhi, used to prepare a paneer sushi during an earlier stint. He would cook the paneer in a clay oven for 10 minutes or so to remove the water from it.

He would cut it and then marinate the slices with different sauces and pastes — soya, sriracha, teriyaki sauce, ooba pesto, tobanjan mayo, tonkatsu sauce and gari (thinly sliced ginger) — for three to four minutes. food delivery in sofia bulgariaHe would take some pickled vegetables, put that in cream cheese and top it with the paneer slices. sushi online bestellen berlinHe would wrap this with nori and rice, and the paneer sushi was ready.sakae sushi buy 1 free 1 red plate Elsewhere, too, chefs are giving an Indian touch to Japanese delights. sushi online bestellen berlin kreuzberg

It’s not on the menu at Zen, the oriental restaurant in The Park, Calcutta, but chef Sharad Dewan tells me that when fusion food is being celebrated, or there is a particular demand from diners, they do Indo-Japanese sushi with ingredients such as banana flower, smoked hilsa, or tuna with pickle masala.ingredients for sushi nori “We do a crisp parshe fish temaki roll,” he says. sushi conveyor belt restaurants“We also do a sushi with smoked dumur (fig), with a sprinkle of panchphoron (five-spice mix).”how to make sushi rice wikipedia In the Indo-Japanese sushis and rolls, the thrust is on the somewhat spicy tastes that Indians like. So the Sakura Delhi roll has paneer tikka, which is garnished with pickled onion, pickled cucumber and Japanese mayo.

Chennai special sushi roll with tandoori prawns “The menu was carefully prepared keeping in mind factors such as the use of spices, flavouring them with vinaigrette rice and so on. We have used both Indian and Japanese sauces and worked with the flavours of the basic ingredients,” chef Akahira says. Neeraj Tyagi, executive chef of Shangri-La’s-Eros Hotel,  New Delhi, which serves Japanese food in its coffee shop, says that a pinch of Malabar spices — peppercorn, cumin seeds and so on — can add to the taste of sushis. For prawn tempura, one can use a thin Amritsari fish batter — with besan, aamchur and ajwain — for a different taste. This can then be fried and put in a sushi, chef Tyagi says. This India-Japanese embrace, I can see, will appeal to a lot of people. Taste, after all, knows no boundaries. So let a thousand cherry and mango blossoms bloom together. Location courtesy: The Metropolitan Hotel & Spa, New Delhi; I have grown up loving a palate-tantalising Bengali dish, the fish paturi, which is essentially a fillet of fish wrapped in a subtle mustard and green chilli paste, and steamed in a banana leaf.

I had never imagined I'd see it being reinvented without any sacrifice of taste. It was Navami, I was at Amantra, The Oberoi Gurgaon's seafood restaurant, for a Bengali food promotion, and I asked for 'banana leaf-steamed bekti with gondhoraj lemon'. What arrived was a 'sushi platter' - slivers of mustard-quilted fish on little mounds of govindabhog, the celebratory rice variety of Bengal, held together by banana leaf strings and served, in an inventive interplay of textures, with crunchy, tangy and sweet achari caramel chikkis made with puffed rice. Mustard bekti 'sushi' at The Oberoi Gurgaon's seafood restaurant Amantra reinvents the fish paturi, an ageless My mother would regard it as blasphemy. So would the Sylheti seamen who jumped ship, opened England's earliest curry houses and invented what's now famous as Brick Lane cuisine. But I savoured this melt-in-the-mouth example of Indian food going global. Another platter on my table had chicken tikka spiked with the very Bengali herb, radhuni, or wild celery seeds.

If you see radhuni, you'd confuse these minuscule seeds with ajwain (carom seeds), and they taste a little bit like ajwain, a little bit like saunf (fennel). And I have never had chicken tikka with a radhuni flavour served with a dollop of kashundi (it is, in my opinion, the best mustard paste you can ever have) yoghurt and gondhoraj lemon sorbet. So, you see, no one has meddled with the flavours - the gastronomic symbols of a Bengali repast, kashundi and gondhoraj (the aromatic fresh lime Bengalis use to flavour their watery masoor dal), are very much present, but the presentation is straight out of a French nouvelle cuisine cookbook. Chicken tikka tastes pleasantly different when spiked with radhuni, a herb every Bengali homemaker loves This is Indian cuisine's emerging international personality. It's exhilarating to see Indian chefs - from the Michelin-starred Vineet Bhatia and Atul Kochhar to Delhi's own Manish Mehrotra - free Indian cuisine from the ignominy of chicken tikka masala and pork vind-kill-all-of-you.

These were invented for lager louts returning from football face-offs. These were made chilli-to-make-you-burn-hot so that those ate them kept ordering chilled lager to douse the fires within. Indian nouvelle cuisine, on the other hand, draws from the tradition of culinary invention, which our cooks have engaged in since the time we infused life into Central Asian kebabs with Indian spices and marinades, and from then on till KC Das invented the 'sponge' rosogolla. The pioneers have broken new ground, now more chefs need to leave the comfort zone of familiar food to enhance the global personality of our contemporary cuisine. Even at Amantra, the management played safe by balancing the avant garde dishes with traditional fare, but when a beginning is made, the wheels of change move inexorably. Not long ago, I had a Navratra meal created by Manish Mehrotra at Indian Accent and was blown away by the aam panna-flavoured candyfloss and charnamrit (nonalcoholic) shots. We have a world of flavours and ingredients in our country.

Let's play with them. Masterchef Australia's celebrity chef-judge George Calombaris was happier in the bylanes of Chandni Chowk on Friday than on the roads of Delhi on a Royal Enfield driven by his other half on the show Gary Mehigan. The reason for his expedition, with cameras and curious onlookers (and not squealing fans for a change!) was the temptress named jalebi, which he can't seem to get enough of. Calombaris made a lightning appearance at the Old and Famous Jalebiwala, which is at the point where the main thoroughfare of Chandni Chowk deflects into Dariba Kalan, the street of the unparalleled pearl, whose jewellery and perfume market dates back to the emperor Shahjahan and was bathed in blood by Nadir Shah in 1739. George Calombaris at the Old and Famous Jalebiwala Located on Chandni Chowk's most famous street, and with a history going back to its founding in 1884, only the Old and Famous Jalebiwala can declare it is famous without sounding arrogant about it.

Each time I visit the hole-in-the-wall shop, I marvel at the juicy jalebis that get a life as they sink and then bob out of the sea of simmering molten ghee in the singular karahi. And I admire how the young man who presides over the show manages to stay unaffected by everything around him - his eyes remain transfixed on his PSP and his fingers move incessantly, going up only when a payment needs to be collected. Calombaris has announced his intention to reinvent the jalebis, but the descendants of Nemi Chand Jain, the shop's founder, are happy to remain Old and of course Famous.When you are the executive sous chef of a historic hotel that has lorded over Lake Geneva for 155 years, you learn to value traditions. And when Raphael Breton says the new nouvelle cuisine is "a traditional meal with the best produce from places around you", you know where he's coming from. 'Simply' Swiss: Raphael Breton In Delhi for a Swiss food promotion at The Leela Palace in Chanakyapuri, Breton makes his point with slivers of mountain air-cured grisson (tenderloin carpaccio) that you are meant to have with shavings of the addictive l'Etivaz cheese sourced from a village 10 km away from Gstaad, the Alpine playground of the rich and famous.

All great food, Breton explains, has its origin in quality produce. He sources his vegetables and herbs from three farms working exclusively for Beau Rivage; his catch of freshwater fish comes every morning between 7 and 8 from Lake Geneva and the supplies from the sea are from fishermen who don't use either big boats or big nets; the veal and beef are from Switzerland's famous Simmental stock, popularised around the world by superchef Alain Ducasse; and the wild mushrooms are from the Swiss Jura mountains. Only if you get the ingredients right, can you make a memorable chestnut cappuccino with a drizzle of truffle oil or turn fresh and smoked salmon into a melt-in-the-mouth sensation with onions, potatoes and leeks cooked in the papet vaudois (or hotpot) style. Breton isn't serving fondue because he wasn't happy with the cheeses you get in Delhi. As he says, "Simple things are the hardest to make." An Indian export item that doesn't get noticed is porcini, the prized mushroom that can turn around a pasta.