The first time I made this dish I didn’t read the ingredients list properly and used salted butter in addition to the added salt so I had to cook an extra batch of plain split black lentils to save the dish.

One second nowhere near, next one - black (or so you think), but my word - make extra to sprinkle on top. I found it difficult to remove all of the chopped garlic whereas slices of garlic would be much easier to fish out. The 103 third parties who use cookies on this service do so for their purposes of displaying and measuring personalized ads, generating audience insights, and developing and improving products.The marinade includes “Indian pickle” - I mixed lime pickle and mango chutney and that worked brilliantly. For me, as folks who read my reviews are more than aware, I like to read my cookbooks, and not just have them as a list of recipes that, let’s face it you can type what you want into the internet and get several options for any recipe. I used 2/3 of the oil suggested and it worked beautifully - it did look a lot at the beginning, but I think it added to the sauce in the end, and it was in no way oily by the end of cooking time. Co-founder Shamil Thakrar, one of the book’s three authors, said that many people “assumed that we released this digital copy for free.

but Dishoom had the whole of this book circulated rather publicly around the internet as a “freebie” by some unscrupulous soul during the pandemic lockdown times of early 2020. In a small bowl, mix 12g of garlic paste (roughly 4 cloves), 10g of ginger paste (roughly 1 heaped tablespoon), 70g of tomato purée, 8g of fine sea salt, ⅔ teaspoon of chilli powder and ⅓ teaspoon of garam masala into a paste. I guess this piracy feels a touch harder during these tricky times when restaurants have no people in them. Might have been a prudent move on my part to read the reviews first; this book is not vegetarian let alone vegan (! This took me much longer than the book suggested for the onions to darken and I think that at first my medium heat wasn’t ferocious enough.

I used my pressure cooker for the first step (25 minutes) and the lentils were already starting to break apart, after adding the tomato and spices I only cooked for a further 20 minutes. Unlike the other comments I've always used the full amount of oil and not had any issues with it, the dish has never felt oily. Looking forward to having this with the chicken dish in the book as suggested or on toast with goat cheese. I also left in the black cardamom pods, cinnamon sticks and Bay leaves until adding the chicken and cream. See them as the cherry atop your already gleeful January cake, or a welcome distraction while you await winter’s end.