The Indian Way To Make Your Dinner 10x Better

For Jyoti Mukharji, cooking didn’t come naturally. In her early days in the kitchen as a medical school grad, she recalls making watery daals and hard rotis that cracked in your mouth like a chip. But with time, cooking became a language she knew fluently. It connected her to her home in India and helped her connect with the community she built for herself in the United States. After deciding to quit her career in medicine to become a full-time mother, she poured her energy into the kitchen and leaned into sharing her knowledge of and love for cooking.

More than 15 years ago, Jyoti began teaching cooking classes in her Kansas City home, welcoming students of all ages. More than 6,500 students later, those lessons inspired Heartland Masala, a cookbook that goes beyond recipes, offering precise cooking advice, step-by-step guidance, a spice glossary, tips for using Indian flavors in unexpected ways and so much more.

Her son Auyon, a musician, writer and culinary historian, helped bring the project to life by writing through her voice based on meticulous documentation over the course of eight years. Together, they’ve created a cookbook that is both practical and deeply personal, reflecting years of teaching, learning and sharing. Through Heartland Masala, she and Auyon invite home cooks to explore Indian cuisine as an adaptable expression of identity.

To share a bit of the duo’s passion and knowledge with you, we chatted with Jyoti and Auyon to dig into the book a bit more. They shared some great tips, tricks and advice for making Indian food at home, including one genius technique you need to try in your kitchen ASAP: tadka.

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What Is Tadka?

What if we told you that if you have some oil, some spices and a skillet that you could elevate your dinner in just one minute? It’s a method called tadka in Hindi or woggarne in Kannada, and known as tempering in English.

“Tadka is a cooking technique where spices are bloomed in hot fat and added to a dish at the beginning or at the end of a cooking process,” Jyoti tells Parade. (Both the cooking method and the resulting spiced fat are both called tadka.)

Because the flavor of spices can be best extracted in fat, tadka is a great method for quickly upgrading a variety of dishes. “Not only does tadka elevate the flavor of a dish, but it also makes it look aesthetically pleasing with the sizzling, colorful spices in fat,” explains Auyon. Tadka is often added on top of dal, a type of lentil soup, but that’s just the beginning.

India is a very diverse country of 29 states, with each state and its regions representing a different version of culture and cuisine. Because of that, tadka has many regional variations, with the type of fat and combination of spices changing by location and cook. While cuisine differs even from city to city, there are some basic differences in how tadka is made across the country.

Jyoti shared that in the North of India, tadka is often a combination of ghee (clarified butter), cumin and asafetida, while in the South, ghee, black mustard seeds, curry leaves and dried red chilis are used. Regions like Gujarat in the West use ghee or peanut oil, cumin, black mustard seeds and asafetida, while cooks in Bengal in the East use mustard oil and panch phoron, a mixture of five whole spices.

How To Make Tadka

If you want to give tadka a try at your house, you can start with a simple cumin version. All you need is cumin seed and some ghee. You can find ghee in many supermarkets and at Indian markets. The clarified butter won’t burn like butter can, which makes it good for making tadka.

To make the tadka, heat a tablespoon of ghee in a small pan over medium heat. When the ghee is hot, sprinkle in about 3/4 teaspoon of cumin seeds and give the pan a shake or two. Cook until the cumin seeds are fragrant and darken by a shade or two. This should take about 20 seconds, but use your eyes, ears and nose to see if you need to cook it a bit longer or pull it off the heat sooner. If the mixture burns, just pour it out, wipe out the pan and try again. When the tadka is done, drizzle it over your dish.

How To Use Tadka

Drizzle the tadka over lentil dishes, chickpea stews, raita or go in a non-Indian direction. The spiced ghee makes a tasty base for a warm vinaigrette, a flavorful garnish for soups (try it on butternut squash soup) and a delicious drizzle for roasted vegetables. In the book, Jyoti and Auyon also mention that tadka is tossed with buttered popcorn or drizzled over nachos.

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3 More Tips for Making Great Indian Food at Home

Jyoti and Auyon share additional go-to kitchen tricks to elevate your meals:

1. Freshly grind your spices

“Toasting and grinding whole spices freshly can make a world of a difference, considering that the potency of preground spices rapidly declines over time,” says Jyoti. She also recommends laying out all the spices and ingredients on the counter before beginning a recipe to make the cooking process quick. Investing in a simple spice grinder helps make this process quick and easy. Pro tip: Don’t use the same grinder for spices and coffee, unless you want your morning brew to taste like last night’s dinner.

2. Take your time (and take it easy on yourself)

Auyon shares that it’s important to read a recipe thoroughly before beginning the cooking process and reading through the historical context and small notes provided by the author. If there are any unfamiliar ingredients, reading about them beforehand can make them feel less intimidating. He also advises readers to be easy on themselves, especially if this is the first time they’re cooking an Indian recipe. If you’re new to cooking the cuisine, start with a simple recipe with a shorter ingredient list.

3. Get ahead

Sauce-based Indian recipes always taste better the next day because the flavors have time to meld and mingle. Making these components of the dish in advance is a great way to to meal prep. Having a big batch of sauces in the fridge or freezer is a huge time saver come dinner time. All you have to do is heat them up, add your beans or proteins and dinner’s done!

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Sources:

• Jyoti and Auyon Mukharji are the authors of the Heartland Masala cookbook. Jyoti is a chef, teacher and retired physician. She immigrated to the US from India in the late 1970s, and began teaching weekly Indian cooking classes out of her home in Prairie Village, KS in 2010. Auyon, Jyoti’s son, is a musician, writer and culinary historian who spends most of his time thinking about food.