In the 1950s, a refugee in Delhi, when most in Delhi were there to seek refuge from political and social upheavals, changed the way Indian food was perceived, accepted, loved and exported. This man deserved a Bharat Ratna for the gems he created without ever knowing how his necessity would become the mother of Indian inventions – the dal makhni and the butter chicken. His name was Kundan Lal Gujaral and he started the Moti Mahal restaurant in Delhi. And while others have perfected the art of making butter chicken and dal makhani, with the Bukhara style of cooking, actually taking it to the next level of perfection, they doff their cooking spoons to Gujaral sahab.
The reason why today’s wandering is devoted to this gem of a man, is because once in a while, the journey of cuisine moves beyond Goa and looks for other tastes that have been delightful companions on this path. While some Indian restaurants, including the Moti Mahal in Goa, have done their solemn service of keeping alive north Indian cooking in the slow cooked style, in clay and with charcoal, the hunt for the right butter chicken, or Burrah kebab or dal makhni is still an ever ending process.
But surprises do not come with weather report updates. It was purely by chance and luck that arguably one of the last stops in this hunt for slow cooked, Bukhara style cooking in Goa was sighted. And it should come as no surprise that this stop is closely linked to the kitchens of Bukhara. On the main road which connects Candolim to Sinquerim, in the heart of the restaurant belt before the Taj holiday village is a mini complex of shops, restaurants and a high end saloon. While the linkage isn’t very obvious, this restaurant is a stand-alone property managed by the Fortune hotel chain which is a part of the ITC, the birthplace of ‘Bukhara’, called “Earthen Oven”. And the linkage gets marinated with the presence of Chef Krishnan, who has not just worked at the Bukhara, the flagship ITC masterpiece restaurant but worked and trained at ITC’s Indian kitchens in other parts of the country, bringing to earthen oven, flavours that had never wafted down these coasts.
On that weekday afternoon, this wanderer and his friends – fellow journeymen on the food route – handpicked three iconic leitmotifs of Bukhara coking.
1. The Dal Makhani which in this case was the Dal Bukhara. When Kundan Lal Gujaral opened his Moti Mahal restaurant in Delhi in the 1950s, dal was always a yellow lentil till Gujaral did wonders with black “urad dal” and mixing it up with tomato and cream and blobs of butter. However, to increase the thickness of the dal, he mixed urad with raajma and channa. The Bukhara dal is inspired by the Moti Mahal Dal but is 100 % urad. This dal gets its thickness due to slow cooking for over 15 hours. In fact this dal is always cooked non stop. Chef Krishnan has indeed managed to get his dal as close to the Bukhara slow cooked dal as possible.
2. The big daddy of all slow cooked charcoal kababs – the Burrah kabab – quite literally a big chunk of finely marinated lamb which falls off the bone or shank, crispy and hard on the surface and tender and very mildly spiced inside, cooked on coal. The pieces have to be marinated overnight using a tenderizer. The one we ordered matched this to the T. Slightly burnt at the sides with the aroma of charcoal on meat lingering on every morsel of the soft meat, made this authentic Bukhara burrah kabab all right.
3. And finally, the butter chicken, which was also created by the same Kundan Lal Gujaral out of pure necessity. His chefs at Moti Mahal needed to re-energise the left over dried tandoori chicken. So they decided to use the left over marinade juices and add butter and tomato and cook the left over tandoor in it. This is where Moti Mahal trumps Bukhara. The authentic Moti Mahal butter chicken remains what butter chicken should be. And this is where even Earthen Oven falls short. It does the same mistake most butter chicken makers do – add an additional dash of sweetness which cuts down the butter and tomato flavour making it a parody of what the chefs of Kundan Lal Gujaral wanted to.
The consistency of butter chicken is consistently inconsistent throughout Goa. Some places get it, sometimes like Joets at Bogmalo, which surprisingly makes butter chicken which Gujaral sahib himself would give pass marks, if not quite distinction. Alila Diwa at Majorda does a mean butter chicken too though their signature is easily the lamb curry, but that’s another story.
And so the hunt does go on. There are some pit stops where it does seem that it is indeed the journey’s end but there are indeed no full stops in Indian cuisine. The journey is at times more rewarding than the destination
