Italian Food 101 (Part 3) We’ve had a detailed articles on pasta already, focusing on ten Italian classics and one on the Indo-Italian style of pasta. Well, now that we are done with the antipasti, it is time to take a look at pastas again, but from a different perspective. Chef Apar Chatterjee talks about…
Tag: pasta
Red, White and Pink
The first plate of pasta I ever had was a 120-rupee plate of penne in red sauce from an obscure little restaurant in Shyambazar, North Kolkata, around 10 years ago. It had these tubes of pasta mixed up with all sorts of exotic veggies in a red sauce, sprinkled with a generous helping of dried…
Roe, Roe, Roe Your Boat
“Roe is the fully ripened internal egg masses in the ovaries, or the released external egg masses of fish and certain marine animals”. The Wikipedia definition of roe makes it seem more suited to a zoology textbook. But many cultures around the world consume some form of fish roe. It is weirdly, a universal culinary…
Pasta La Vista (Part 3)
From North to South Last time, we looked at four classic Italian pasta sauces, with an aside on the great Italian tomato. This week, we finish our pasta series by looking at six more. Pasta 5, the pasta al ragu involves a lot more time, creating an incredibly complex sauce. You could use mince and…
Pasta La Vista (Part 2)
Green, White and Red Last time, we explored the basics of pasta, comparing dried and fresh varieties, with a brief look at the stuffed and baked pastas. This week, we start our exploration of ten classic pasta dishes. All of these involve cooking the pasta and adding it to a sauce. We’ve already talked about…
Pasta La Vista (Part 1)
Pasta 101 Pasta has become one of those global dishes, with almost every country having their own twist on it. Indians have their red, white and pink sauces, the Egyptian koshari is a mish-mash of rice and macaroni among other things, and the Italian-American cultural intermingling during the turn of the last century has created…
A Tale of Two Peninsulas
Growing up, the only exotic cuisines I was exposed to were Chinese (Indo-Chinese to be precise) and the so-called Continental food, a blanket term referring to foods from the continent of Europe. It was only in the past few years that Kolkata has seen an increased influx of global cuisines, including “Italian food”. Even then,…
The Ottimo Odyssey (Part 1)
In this article and the next, I will break down in some detail the amazing meal I had at Ottimo in Hyderabad’s ITC Kohenur, a couple of months ago. The menu is elaborate and we knew that we would be spoiled for choice, so we had left it to the chef to craft a tasting…
The Gourmet Glutton 