Find recipes from Jamie Oliver’s 2023 Channel 4 cookery TV series 5 Ingredient Meals and accompanying cookbook 5 Ingredients Mediterranean. Onions and shallots are used widely across India, where they are a pale pink colour and generally smaller and slightly milder than either the brown or red onions in the UK. I see deep red colours from lots of Kashmiri chillis, tinged with a suggestion of yellow from turmeric. It’s the lichen off a tree, known as dagarful, kalpasi or stone flower, with a flavour like cinnamon. For perfect results, toast the spices individually, such as for garam masala, but life is short and I find that if I attend to them carefully I can get away with doing them all together.

Recipe for Chettinad chicken from Rick Stein’s India Recipe for Chettinad chicken from Rick Stein’s India

Rick is best known for a love of fresh, simple seafood and made his name in the 90s with his earliest books and television series based on his life as chef and owner of The Seafood Restaurant (established in 1975) in the fishing port of Padstow. After hours spent observing and learning in kitchens across the country, he came away not only with a collection of faithfully recorded recipes, from a fragrant korma to a rich butter chicken, but an understanding of the essential components of India’s world-renowned curries.Thread the chicken on to lightly oiled metal skewers (you can put more than one piece per skewer, but leave space between them) then suspend the skewers above a roasting tin. When I heard that the Taj Gateway hotel in Madurai had employed a local housewife to cook some of the region’s dishes, I knew they were on to something. For eating raw, for example in a salad, I prefer to use red onions or shallots for their sweeter flavour and pleasing colour. This does lead me to wonder whether all the stories about how chicken tikka masala was invented in the UK are true.

NEW BOOK AND TV – Rick Stein’s India - Rick Stein

Add the water, and cook for about 10–15 minutes, stirring often and adding more splashes of water if needed to stop it sticking to the pan, until the chicken is cooked through and the sauce thick and reduced and clinging to the chicken.

Rick divides his time between his businesses and homes with his wife, Sarah between Padstow, London and Australia. For the koftas, put all the kofta ingredients apart from the vegetable oil into a food processor and blend to a very smooth paste. Thakur is royalty, he is a Rajput; I asked his wife Sandhyo what it was like being married to a Rajput and she said, ‘I too am a Rajput, we don’t marry out of our caste.

Rick Stein Books | WHSmith Rick Stein Books | WHSmith

Sharing the dishes he most loves to cook for family and friends, Rick takes you inside their home kitchens unlike he’s done in any previous book.

Extracted from the book, these 5 essential tips form the building blocks of accomplished curries, helping you to cook them from scratch with ease. Or simply aim to serve a poussin per person (or half a poussin per person across a spread of dishes).

Rick Stein’s India - The Happy Foodie 5 curry tips from Rick Stein’s India - The Happy Foodie

For the second marinade, put all the ingredients apart from the chat masala into a mini food processor. Afterwards, in conversation with him, I realized that they’d used his house as the ex-British Raj Club in the film The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel, where the character played by Celia Imrie went hunting for rich men.But for most of the recipes in this book I found that the standard brown onions work perfectly well.