Gobhi Manchurian

Gobhi Manchurian with burnt garlic fried rice.

This is India's homegrown answer to Chinese food. With apologies to the good people of Manchuria, who have no clue what delights are being created in their name here!

This dish owes so much to the Chinese immigrants in the Tangra neighbourhood of Calcutta, and the ingenuity of the legendary Nelson Wang, who single-handedly gave Indians the illusion that they were eating Chinese food. This dish was perfected by Wang in his pioneering Indian-Chinese restaurant, China Garden, in Bombay in the 1980s.

This is the kind of slow-brew long-term assimilation and melding of cuisines that brings about innovative new food. Slapping butter chicken on pizza is not the route to innovation; that’s just crass commercial fusion. This dish is an example of how great new cuisines are born — Indian ingredients and spices meet Chinese cooking techniques.

After the prep, we begin with the sauce — filled with onion, garlic, spring onion, assorted peppers and chillies. I do a veggie-forward sauce. You can do the sauce without all these veggies — that is, with just onion and garlic, if you’d like. Add soy sauce, chilli sauce, any other sauces you like, and cornflour.

For the gobhi balls, grated cauliflower, grated carrots, plain flour, salt, and sichuan peppper are rolled into golf-ball size kofta-style balls.

The gobhi balls are then fried to crisp gold and coated in the gloopy, tangy sauce.

Meanwhile, fry some garlic nibs and brown almost to the point of burning. Add leftover rice and stir-fry. This works best with day-old rice, as freshly-made rice is too fragile and tends to break down into a blob.

No one in the North Eastern Chinese region of Manchuria knows that we in India are cooking up these delights in their name. :)