Have you ever eaten a kadai paneer at a good Punjabi restaurant (not one that claims to serve Chettinadu, Chinese, Punjabi and, in complete violation of Set Theory and Venn diagrams, Tandoori!)?
Have you then wondered why it tastes so much better than any paneer dish you can concoct at home with the finest of ingredients — like milk from Ayurvedically-massaged cows curdled into the softest paneer, freshly-ground homemade garam masala, and organic, non-GMO, locally sourced, Noam Chomsky reading tomatoes?
Of course, the restaurant has slightly less regard for your arteries than you might, and will use enough oil to lubricate a truck engine. But that’s not the only reason.
You might also think that the restaurant uses more spices than you do at home. They do, but not in the way you think. You could try doubling the amount of spice powders you use at home, and all you will end up with is something that has the consistency of concrete sludge!
Perhaps the restaurant has a secret source of amazingly high-quality ingredients? Nope. In fact, the brutally competitive nature of that business forces them to procure the cheapest ingredients in bulk. So why does dal makhni from a restaurant taste different? The food science trick here is flavour layering.
If you have ever committed the costly error of trying to make dal makhni at home, you will know that it takes eight hours of soaking the whole urad dal, and pressure cooking it for, approximately, the duration of 20 signal changes at Tidel Park, then waiting for the onion, ginger, garlic and tomatoes to lose moisture at the rate of the Sahara desert after the last ice age, only to finally wonder why it still looked like a dubiously brownish-green bowl of black pebbles.
The restaurant, on the other hand, delivers a dal with a silky sheen, generally only seen in shampoo ads, in under 10 minutes. How do they do that, you might wonder?
It will surprise you to learn that a restaurant’s need to deliver quickly results in a cooking technique that ends up layering more flavour in every dish. It is called “base gravies”.
Before the restaurant opens for business, the kitchen will take a giant pot, and add oil, kilograms of onions, tomatoes, ginger, garlic, whole spices, salt and water and let it cook down for a few hours. This is then blended into a smooth gravy and kept ready.
When you order the paneer makhni, the chef will quickly fry onions, ginger, garlic and spices at high heat, add the already cooked base gravy and then finish the dish with cream or butter. Note how the spices are used twice, once in the base gravy and again when prepping the dish.
The spices in the base gravy that was cooked over many hours take on a mellower, rounded taste while the spices added when the dish is prepared, add an edgier, brighter note. This layering makes the dish more flavourful overall.
You could do this at home over the weekend, and pour the base gravy into ice trays and freeze them. Just shake open a couple of gravy cubes when you need them to make restaurant style murg jhalfrezi at home in less time than it takes for you to Swiggy it!