Tsampa, puffed ragi, agar agar: Swetha Sivakumar on tinkering with new ingredients

Hindustan Times

2 days ago

How adventurous are you in the kitchen? Do you find yourself buying an ingredient you've never used, simply because a recipe for it caught your eye? How strange is too strange? That's a subjective question. Agar-agar, for instance, can be used to make these, errr..., interesting fruit jello cakes. (Pixabay)
Do you have puffed ragi or agar agar strips tucked away in the pantry; does it secretly bother you that you might never use them? Let's be honest: not every ingredient is going to be a hit.
Take tsampa. This roasted-barley flour is a staple in Tibetan cuisine. I paid good money for some and tried using it a couple of times. Now it just sits there. I can't quite figure out how to incorporate it into my cooking. I have learnt to accept that's okay.
For every tsampa, there is a miso or tahini or maple syrup that I hadn't even heard of growing up, and is now something I cook with every week. For my mom's generation, soy sauce may have been as unfamiliar as tsampa is to me. That's how pantries evolve… the exotic becoming the everyday, in small, curious steps.
For the home cook, a very real challenge today is identifying which ingredients, from the vast list at our disposal, can actually enrich their meals. The next big step is finding ways to help the family embrace new tastes and textures.
One way to do this is to involve everyone in the grocery shopping. My younger daughter, for instance, is a fan of cooking shows and baking experiments and I noticed on recent excursions that she had become really curious about cheese. I typically stick to paneer, Swiss and cheddar. But the last time we went grocery-shopping together, we explored the cheese section of a fancy store.
I found it overwhelming at first, but the person behind the counter was kind, and generous with samples. She explained textures and flavour profiles to us. We took a few cheeses home and did not end up loving every wedge, but it was a starting point.
What made the experience truly precious was the memory of my daughter and me, standing in our kitchen with a cheese plate, pretending to be connoisseurs. We gave dramatic feedback and announced fake ratings to an imaginary audience. We nibbled and giggled and had a truly memorable afternoon.
What I'm trying to say is, this is a long game. It takes time to figure out how to expand one's list of favourite ingredients. The good news is it is one more thing to bring the family together over, and it doesn't have to break the bank.
For example, I now know that fermented chilli pastes such as gochujang and harissa can be relied upon to bring a complex, umami-rich flavour to simple starches such as rice and noodles. I've learned that yellow vatana makes for excellent dal vadas (a lesson I learnt when I realised, mid-cook, that I had run out of chana dal).
It is a particular thrill learning from one's mistakes and wins, rather than from a cookbook. I like to think of it as running experiments in my own lab, and building a personal library of tastes and textures.
So go ahead, buy that ingredient you've never cooked with. You're not wasting time. You're honing a skill. In my book, that's a passion worth pursuing.
(To reach Swetha Sivakumar with questions or feedback, email [e-mail])