Tips to Enrich Your Gustatory Experience with Indian Food

Though initially Indian food was looked down upon by Westerners for being oily and spicy, today Westerners have started understanding the importance of spices and thereby the wholesomeness of Indian food. Result? The number of Indian restaurants and caterers is increasing in Western countries and Westerners love this food, not only for its nutritive values, but for its awesome taste, which is hardly found in any other cuisine. If you are planning to choose Indian food for your event, what should you look for? Let’s see.

Decide Which Style You and Your Guests would Love

Yes, Indian cooking is not only one style – there are numerous different styles, viz. South Indian, North Indian, Punjabi, Maharashtrian, Bengali, Gujarati and so on.

You have to also understand that whichever style it is, Indian catering mainly contains vegetarian food, especially if it’s a wedding caterer, since wedding is considered to be an auspicious event and meat is not allowed in it. So, if you want meat, fish and poultry items on your menu, you should confirm whether the caterer would serve them.

Also understand that in any style of Indian cuisine, there are certain types of breads (depending upon the regional style), vegetable dishes, pulse dishes (daals), various kinds of rice dishes, condiments like chutneys, achaars, raitas and papads, and desserts. There may be many fried items too like puris, samosas, vadas, pakodas etc. If they are part of the packages, but you don’t want them, see if you can get the cost reduced by removing them. Or instead you can add healthy items like salads. You can even cut on desserts and limit them to one or two.

Ask if You can Sample the Food

It would be the best if you can sample the food so that you can cut down all the too-oily and too-sweet dishes, Indian cuisine is known for. But you should consider including dishes made with pure ghee which is the specialty of Indian food. Ghee is characteristic to Indian cuisine and was also considered unhealthy by Westerners previously, but later its health benefits were discovered and today it’s highly accepted. Ghee is mainly used in desserts offering them a rich taste.

Other Indian specialties not much known in Western countries are desserts made with jaggery (especially found in South Indian cuisine), besan (gram flour) dishes, lassi (buttermilk – this can be sweet or salty), curd (eaten as it is or added to raitas and dahivadas), khoya (a type of condensed milk) desserts and so on.

Follow these tips and yours and your guests’ gustatory experience is going to be enriched with Indian food. Bon appetit!