Meherwan Irani’s No. 1 Best Indian Cooking Tips in the World

The Dinner Plan

Chef Meherwan Irani joins Maggie Hoffman to discuss his new cookbook, 'No. 1 Best Indian Cookbook in the World,' which draws from his childh

Key takeaways

• Meherwan Irani's cookbook is inspired by his childhood experiences eating street food in India.
• To improve cooking motivation, keep kitchen counters clear of clutter and stock them with accessible tools like onions, garlic, and ginger.

Main topics

• Indian street food culture
• Kitchen organization and prep tips

Notable quotes

Cooking is part work, part nourishment, and part hobby.

Conclusion

The episode provides actionable culinary wisdom for home cooks looking

Transcript preview

Speaker 3 (0:00) Thanks to Marabella Sparkling Tea for supporting this episode. If you care as much about what's in your glass as what's on the plate, Marabella belongs on your table. Speaker 2 (0:10) Marabella Wild Verbena is a dry, alcohol-free sparkling tea made with organic green and white teas, lemon Speaker 3 (0:17) verbena, and a whisper of lavender. It has bright citrus and delicate floral notes and fine bubbles. Serve chilled with dinner, friends, or anytime. Find Marabella Sparkling Tea at marabellatea.com or on Amazon. Speaker 3 (0:37) Welcome to The Dinner Plan, where we start every week with fresh cooking inspiration. I'm Maggie Hoffman, and today I'm in the studio to talk with Marwan Arani. His Asheville restaurant, Chai Pani, is a James Beard Award winner. He's also behind Botiwala in Atlanta, Charlotte, Asheville, and Raleigh. He has a spice company called Spicewala, and now he's written a cookbook with Jamie Feldmaier called Number One Best Indian Cookbook in the World. Mero, and welcome to The Dinner Plan. Thanks for coming out to Brooklyn. Oh, Speaker 1 (1:07) thanks for having me. It's a pleasure to be here. Speaker 3 (1:09) I'm so glad you're here. I was just telling you, I was reading this book, and it's just one of these books where you're like, I should go to bed. And then I just kept reading, and I kept reading. It is packed with really interesting information. Speaker 1 (1:23) Oh, thanks. Well, that's what I was going for, some light bedtime reading, you know, something to help you fall asleep every night, dreaming of samosas. Speaker 3 (1:29) So a lot of chefs don't eat at home that much, but it's always interesting to hear what they do make when they have a minute to cook at home. What's something you've cooked at home recently? Speaker 1 (1:40) I've been recently obsessed with sandwiches. All summer long, it was BLTs, and I think I've entered my tuna sandwich phase. And when I say obsessed, it's not just, oh, can I make a decent tuna sandwich? You've got to go through all the varietals of the different types of tuna. Is it packed in brine, packed in olive oil? What works best? Are you going with candied jalapenos, or are you going with the classic pickles, a little bit of onion, squeeze of lime juice, some really great olive oil, obsessing over the bread, and my God, the mayonnaise. So many different variations in mayonnaise that you can obsess over. But it's part you're making dinner, but you're also part exploring a hobby, which if you're a chef, at the end of the day, Cooking is part work, part nourishment, and part hobby. So I'm kind of diving into the hobby part of the job right now and start simple, sandwiches, you know, basic foundational stuff. Speaker 3 (2:29) I mean, that can be a really good place to remind yourself that this is fun. Speaker 1 (2:34) Exactly. I can't imagine a more fun meal to make than a great sandwich. In fact, there's a whole section of my book that's dedicated to sandwiches. I just think they're underrated. as haute cuisine. If you do it right, you can have a brilliant sandwich that really should belong in a Michelin-starred restaurant. Speaker 3 (2:49) So when you're on this journey, are you making like a tuna sandwich once a week or at the night? I'm saying Speaker 1 (2:55) there's a tuna sandwich happening probably three times a week right now. And Molly and I have different tastes in tuna sandwiches. I have to make two batches, one for her, one for me. She's not that crazy about the candied jalapenos in hers. So I think it's brilliant. Speaker 3 (3:07) That sounds so good. How about Speaker 1 (3:09) you? What are you obsessing about dinner-wise? Speaker 3 (3:11) I made a really good recipe that I can't stop telling people about. That was from Jenny Rosenstock, who has Weekday Vegetarians. She has this recipe. She's not fully vegetarian. She has this recipe for chicken cutlets where the breading is half panko and half crushed honey mustard pretzels. And I used... It's so smart. That is Speaker 1 (3:34) so smart. Speaker 3 (3:34) I used those dots. Pretzels, do you know these? Which Speaker 1 (3:38) ones? Speaker 3 (3:39) The Dots honey mustard pretzels. They're like some kind of magic is on there. No, but Speaker 1 (3:44) yeah, honey mustard pretzel crust, amazing. Speaker 3 (3:47) So flavorful. And then she serves it on a salad with like a honey mustard dressing that has some yogurt in it. Speaker 1 (3:54) All right, well, your dinner obsession sounds way more interesting than mine. I'm just working on a sandwich. I got to work my way up to a panko or a honey pretzel crusted chicken breast. I love it. Speaker 3 (4:04) I mean, your next round can be salads, but I do feel like I come on the show every week. I try to find something cool to recommend. But truly, I believe that it's fine to make the same thing over and over. Speaker 1 (4:15) Yeah, I mean, I think it's fine to obsess over something until you get it perfect. One of the most fun parts about being a chef is the idea that you can obsess over something until you get it to where it's at least as perfect as it can be. And again, I'm a big advocate of the sandwich right now. I think it's... I'm going to stick, hold to my guns with the sandwich part here. I think it's a phenomenal, underrated lunch or dinner option, especially dinner. Speaker 3 (4:40) All right, so let's get into the book. Your grandparents had a bed and breakfast when you were little, when your family moved there when you were four. Tell us a bit about what they cooked and any food memories from your childhood that were going through your head as you were working on this book. Speaker 1 (4:55) I'd say that period of growing up in India at this bed and breakfast, I'm calling it loosely that. was probably the most formative in terms of the journey that it took to ending up, you know, being a chef and opening a restaurant. And I explain this in the book, and the story's been covered before, but essentially this was in the early 70s when I moved back to India at the age of four. My mom and dad, they were expats in London, and it coincided with a wave, an influx of Westerners, as we call them, Americans and Europeans, coming to my tiny little hometown for the simple reason that there was an ashram there of a spiritual master. Now, he had passed away. But the ashram was still there. And this is a time where long-haired hippies from America were coming to India all the time looking for spirituality in a bottle, right? So in my hometown, there wasn't any accommodations or a place for somebody from the West to stay that would make any kind of sense. So my grandmother opened up the family home to accommodate these folks visiting. But when it came to the food, all of a sudden, we were all dining together. So all of a sudden, my mom, who was primarily handling the cooking duties in the house, along with some staff that were helping her, had to figure out how to make food that would appeal to us, that we'd want to eat, as well as appeal to the Westerners that were visiting. And what I really consider one of the most intuitive, brilliant moves that I've ever seen anybody do, given a situation like that, the default would have been some sort of weird fusion. She said, no, we're going to actually cook what we cook normally, but I'm going to try to, without dumbing it down, without stripping of the essence of what the dish is meant to be. because we still have to eat it, make it appealing to the palate of somebody from America. And till today, I strive to find that balance because I really think that all good food is universal. You don't have to acquire a palate to like if it's delicious. And she figured this out 40 years ago. So every dish at Chai Pani is a quest to kind of find a dish that I think is delicious as an Indian, but also for someone that's never had Indian food before. is just outrageously delicious. And the genre that really stuck with me when I said, what is it going to be with street food? Because I would leave home, sneak out, skip dinner, lunch, whatever, and go get street food in the streets, knowing fully well that if my mom found out I was doing that, she'd get really mad at me. Because you get sick eating the food in the streets. And the one time she caught me doing it, she said, why are you doing this? I'm like, mom, it's Bale Porridge. It's delicious. She's like, let me make it for you. Speaker 1 (7:24) If you don't think mine is better, then you can go back out and eat on the street. And that's when I realized, oh, wait a minute. As a home cook, she could do a better job making this dish that I thought only belonged on the street. So it kind of got the wheels turning a long time ago as a kid. Now, of course, all this stuff is in the subconscious. It's part of your collective food memory. But it all came bubbling up to the surface in 2009. And most especially that bale puri, this particular street food dish that's basically like... The best way to describe it would be like a puff rice crispy salad with tamarind chutney and green chutney and crispy, crunchy wheat crackers and puff rice and freshness of onions and cilantro and sometimes potatoes in it. And the version she made at home is probably one of the strongest food memories I have in mind, in particular because she proved her point. She could make it better than the street vendors that I was eating from. Speaker 3 (8:14) Did you still sneak out? Speaker 1 (8:15) Oh, gosh, yes, because there was so much more. And also, it's culturally the most fun thing to do. It wasn't just about the food. It was about the naughtiness of it. It was the forbidden fruit, if you will. So Speaker 3 (8:25) you didn't have a plan to become a restaurateur, though. Tell us a bit about what inspired you to eventually get in the food business. Speaker 1 (8:33) Everybody loves talking about their mom and how great their food is. But I just have to say that this is one of those rare instances where the hype was for real. She was a remarkable cook and the style of cooking that she developed. of taking Indian food and getting rid of the non-essential stuff, the stuff, the layers that get built over centuries of tradition that sometimes make no sense, and where the very essence of the ingredient is buried. That was how I grew up eating. So to come to America and to, as a college student, and to go to your first Indian restaurant in America, it was just a complete shock to my system, to my nervous system. My palate couldn't quite figure out what the heck was going on. And then the second realization that, wait a minute, every Indian restaurant that I walked into was serving one very particular style of cuisine, North Indian cuisine, Punjabi cuisine in particular, and being broadcast as Indian cuisine was also blowing my mind. Now, this may seem today kind of almost not some sort of breakthrough, but I'm talking about 1990, early 90s when I first came here. And it was a breakthrough to find a restaurant that wasn't doing just North Indian cuisine. That bit about the way my mom was cooking and watching Americans around the table losing their minds, I wasn't seeing that when I went with my white friends to an Indian restaurant. They were having an ethnic experience, but they weren't losing their minds. And there was almost a, Maggie, I don't know how to describe it, I was almost offended in a sort of a 20-something kind of way that one of the greatest cuisines of the world that I believe to be just this remarkable 5,000-year-old cuisine. had been narrowed down. I mean, imagine if all we thought of Italian food was just like red sauce. And I'd never imagined that I'd be the one to actually take the leap of saying, let me dip my foot in the water to see if I can change something. And that's a whole different story of how I got there. But the core desire to want to see the place that I came from represented differently on the plate in an Indian American restaurant was probably born. watching my mom serve Americans at home when I was five, six, seven years old. Speaker 3 (10:38) Amazing. So the book celebrates street food, and you point out that a street vendor has really limited space to prep and to cook, and there's a mindset that's worth learning there in order to make the cooking process at home go more smoothly. What are the things that we should be thinking about when we go in the kitchen? What should we always do before we start cooking? Speaker 1 (11:02) Oh, the most abused surface in any home is that poor kitchen counter. It is covered in junk in the average home. People use it to dump their purses, their mail, the car keys. Or it's this blank canvas. Nothing. Just a showpiece of white marble stretching for half a mile on the kitchen island with nothing. I'm like, your shower stall doesn't have anything other than everything you need to shower with, right? So the number one thing is make your kitchen counter work for one thing and one thing only, to cook. So get rid of the clutter. Don't use it as a dumping ground for everything coming out of the house. And instead, stock it full of things that want to make you cook, that makes it easier to want to do. And I think the number one problem with people cooking at home often is they just make it too hard to get started. Just open that kitchen drawer. You don't need 15 knives. You just need one good one. You don't need 18 spatulas, like all this junk that we accumulate. So my number one tip is get rid of the junk. You don't need as much of the pots and pans and ladles and spoons and strainers and knives as you think you do. It's just clutter that gets in the way of you getting started. And make sure your kitchen counter is set up to where everything on there is within reach and makes you want to cook. I keep a giant bowl of onions and garlic and ginger on the counter at all times. So even if I'm not sure what to do, I said, let me start by dicing an onion. It's just the fact that you start doing something and maybe inspiration will come. I keep the salt, the pepper, the oil, the condiments, not locked up in a pantry closet behind a door where out of sight, out of mind, but laid out in front of me so that if I'm staring at a bottle of pomegranate molasses, maybe it'll trigger me to go, oh, I can do something with that. So make all the tools you need to cook with visible and handy and get rid of the rest of the clutter. My number one tip. Speaker 3 (12:49) And maybe that pile of dishes. Yeah, Speaker 1 (12:52) I mean, that's the other problem I have is don't start cooking with a dirty kitchen and a pile of dishes in the sink. It just makes it so much harder. Half of the problem that I have with cooking the way I do is I just am lazy and don't want to do all the cleanup afterwards. I swear to God, I sometimes walk in after somebody's finished cooking. I'm like, did you lick every spoon in the drawer and put it in the sink? How could you possibly go through so many ladles and spoons? I use one ladle pretty much to cook sometimes seven or eight dishes because all you have to do is after you finish stirring is turn around and give it a three-second rinse, and you can use the same ladle again instead of throwing it in the sink and piling up dishes. So yeah, clear your sink, put everything away, use one ladle, use one knife. You'll find cooking more enjoyable, pleasurable, because it's suddenly less work. You do not need five different sizes of frying pans. A 10 or 12 inches, you can do everything you need in that for the average person cooking at home. Yeah. Most people want a tip on how to cook better. I'm saying how to prep to cook better is my number one tip. Speaker 3 (13:56) That makes so much sense. So the book begins with chat, like the crunchy salad ones, the chutney, the crispy fried bites. If I wanted to invite some friends over and make a bunch of these, like it's a chat party, where should I start? What recipes should I do? And how can we plan it out? Are some of them sort of like eat as soon as they're made and other something we can prep ahead? What is our party plan? Your Speaker 1 (14:20) party plan is, I love the idea of a chat party, by the way. And I'd say the party plan is go chat bar, like taco bar, right? So you don't pre-make the tacos for everybody because they're going to be a mess. So you do the same thing with chat. So go ahead and make the chutneys, just like you'd be making tomatillo sauce or salsa, whatever have you. So your tamarind chutney, and the stuff lasts forever, by the way. It's kind of like ketchup. So you can make tamarind chutney at a time. Your green chutney ahead of the time, your diced onions, your diced cilantro, some diced mint, julienne mint, some green chilies chopped up. And then all the components for making chaat, the crispy, crunchy bits, the puris, the little fried wheat crackers, the puff rice, the little crispy, crunchy chickpea noodles, the little cornflakes, you know, we call them corn poha. All the stuff that you're buying to make a chaat party, make little bowls of them and set them out almost like a bar. And then you can have a couple of basic instructions if you want to write. You know, people write a little card and put it out. But what I love about it is like you can't go wrong. Mix and match. Have fun. It's like making your own taco. Right? Add