If you are based in India, you’d have to be living under a rock to not know who Chef Ajay Chopra is. Foodie or not, I can guarantee you that almost all of your assorted social media feeds have at some point or the other been ‘assaulted’ by his cookery shows and recipe videos with alarming alacrity.
His camera-friendly demeanour, easy-to-follow recipes, and general conviviality are just a few of the things that make watching his videos, and then, trying out his recipes, a must-do activity. Trust me, I speak from experience!
Now, imagine all that distilled into an equally easy-to-follow, fun cookbook with the ever-smiling chef emblazoned onto its cheery yellow hardback front cover. The Big Daddy Chef Cook Book is Ajay Chopra’s self-published attempt that urges and prods you to “cook amazing restaurant style dishes at home and be the superhero”, and he puts it across in his usual inimitable way.
Easy peasy
Interestingly, the premise of the book is the bringing of restaurant-style dishes into one’s home cooking repertoire. Something, that is actually the reverse of what is happening in restaurants across India today. A time when culinary ‘woke-ness’ is a powerful buzzword. Along with other multi-hyphenated phrases like ‘farm-to-table’ and ‘nose-to-tail’ dining.
All this, especially among those eateries serving Indian cuisine and more so, regional Indian food. Places where the focus is on the home-style cooking of simple dishes sans any fuss. Where comfort food leads the way and our palates ahead into (what I can only hope is) a soon-to-be post-pandemic era.
In the book’s preface, the author writes that his idea for producing this book was to celebrate cooking with some classic restaurant-style dishes that we’ve all loved eating at restaurants. He does this with great success and honesty. Well, for the most part, at least.
How else can one explain his guileless audacity and straightforwardness of giving us recipes for much-loved, but greatly clichéd restaurant dishes like a palak shorba (pg.6) soup and a pindi chole (pg.143)? Or for the delicious, if pedestrian, triple ‘M’ alliteration dish of methi matter malai (pg.85).
Clinching the clichés
By any other measure, I should have greatly detested this book. For it contains recipes for several dishes that I’d never ever order at a restaurant, forget to make at home. I mean, the book has eight recipes devoted to a dairy protein much-loathed by me, i.e. paneer. Five in a straight line, along successive pages (pg.96-105), I may as well chime in!
There is also the ubiquitous glut of ‘Chindian’ restaurant classics like manchow soup (pg.9), paneer (there we go again!) crispy chilli (pg.18), veg manchurian (pg.27), and the hallowed chilly chicken (pg.69). But then, there are also twists with recipes for that of the very fashionable and “in” mock meat kathal biryani (pg.134) and a divine cherry rasgulla cheesecake (pg.201), that’s also incidentally, the very last recipe in the book.
Off ratios
Having said that, there were quite a few glaringly discordant notes that I encountered while reviewing this one. None, however, has anything to do with the well-laid-out pages employing easy-to-read large fonts and brilliantly taken food images.
I did feel that the book had a decidedly North Indian cuisine predilection, with a few token chicken ghee roasts (pg.124) and kosha mangshos (pg.132) thrown in to democratise things a bit. But not enough to give it a pan-Indian credibility.
The rice lover in me was also sorely disappointed to find just three recipes celebrating the grain. But again, those too were either North-style biryanis or a schezwan fried rice (pg.146). And while three might seem plenty, try putting that up against nine varieties of parathas alone that even have their own section (pg.152-177).
A wearer of many hats in the food and travel space, Mumbai-based Raul Dias is a food-travel writer, a restaurant reviewer, and a food consultant
Check the book on Amazon here.
About the Book
