Chef Michael Swamy’s new book tells you how to use wine instead of water for cooking Indian recipes. Sweet wines are best for preparing desserts while dry red wine is good for meat and grilled vegetables. He chats with D Kaushik
Did you ever think of ditching your lemon soda and choosing a full-bodied Chardonnay instead to go with pav bhaji, chhole bhature or chicken tikkaIJ Don’t be startled. Anything from samosa to paneer bhurji and every kind of Indian food can be paired with wine, says Michelin chef Michael Swamy. Not just that any Indian recipe can be cooked with wine, you just need to get your basics right. It is to make people learn about these basics that Swamy came up with the book Guide to Pairing Indian Food and Wine (published by Om Books in association with Nine Hills from Pernod Ricard India).
Says Swamy, “I think in a certain way wine is new to the country. Now, there’s a lot of young crowd drinking wine. There has been awareness on wine pairing but not many try it with Indian chaat, or say, mithaai. Then there are questions like what should one do with the leftover wine. Do I just drink it or throw it, since after three days it becomes vinegar. So the book is here to tell people how wine can replace water in Indian cooking. The rules that one should keep in mind while pairing wine with Indian cuisine apply to cooking as well. I won’t use a sweet wine to cook chicken. I should use a dry wine, a wine which is not sweet in its texture. Sweet wines are for desserts, dry red wines are for meat. I can also use dry white wine for chicken. Always keep in mind that if you are using a sweet wine, the recipe will also turn out to be sweet. For instance, if you are cooking paneer with sweet wine and mix lot of spices, the result will be a disaster. Or if you will cook red pumpkin, which is sweet, in sweet wine, you will get something candy sweet. Wine is perfect for grills and barbeques. You can use dry red wine as a marinade for vegetables, paneer and mushrooms or if you are grilling fruits, use sweet wine for the marinade. When you cook with wine, sometimes a lot of flavours dissipate in the cooking process. You should make up for it by adding spices like clove, cardamom, star anise and kababchini.”
Swamy, who has trained at the prestigious Cordon Bleu culinary school in london, says cooking with wine is not just for the elites but could soon find its way into the kitchens of middle class families too. For the recipes in the book, Swamy used eight varietals of wine and created a recipe. Swamy offers an assortment of Indian as well as continental food recipes, along with a wine pairing suggestion for each recipe. “Since the alcoholic content and flavours are burnt while cooking, it’s good to pair the dish with the same wine,” he adds.
The book also includes some easy-to-cook snacks like spinach fritters and onion springs that can be cooked with wine. He points out that before serving the dish, to-be-paired wine should be chilled.“This is one of the most common mistakes we do. We have moderately hot temperature throughout and it is necessary to serve wine at a certain temperature to get right flavours. Even red wines should be served chilled,” he points out.
Though wine tasting and appreciation sessions are now common in the city, Indian cooking with wine is not mostly talked about. Swamy says there are only a few chefs who have been experimenting with wine. “No Indian chef has yet talked about cooking Indian dishes with wine. There are very few chefs who would experiment and most chefs are tied up by the hotels so for them to experiment is very hard. Chefs who really experiment are standalone, independent chefs,” says Swamy, who was also the food consultant for MasterChef India Season 1 and 2.
Swamy has been writing a book on cooking with wines for past couple of years. He says that the recently-launched book is like excerpts from his own book, which will be a result of many experiments and research. “The writing will come out as series, like barbeque, desserts and so on. It will be about recipes, pairing, chemical changes that a wine goes through when we cook with it, wine as a marinade among many other things,” he informs. Michael has launched his own culinary channel on YouTube called Cottagechefculinaire “which is much more than recipe videos.”