Masala Farm: Stories and Recipes from an Uncommon Life in the Country

By Suvir Saran, Raquel Pelzel, Charlie Burd and Ben Fink

An acclaimed Indian chef shares the life and flavor of his New York State farm in this beautifully illustrated seasonal cookbook.

Suvir Saran, an Indian chef and consummate city dweller, took an unusual leap when he decided to buy a farm in upstate New York. But that leap led to some fascinating stories—and some delicious results! In Masala Farm, Saran invites readers into his kitchen and offers a fresh twist on farm-to-table cooking.

A steady stream of houseguests, the challenges of animal ownership, and the joys of being a part of a small-town community supply the stories woven throughout this volume. Sixty recipes are organized by season. Exquisite photography captures the lusciousness of Saran’s food and the beauty of the countryside.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: May 4, 2012
• ISBN: 9781452110325

Book preview

INTRODUCTION:

City Boys, Country Masala

Live life with masala, and your mind, stomach, and spirit will always be satiated.

In Hindi, masala means spice. In its simplest translation, masala is used to define a singular spice—like cinnamon or ground ginger—or a spice blend—like garam masala or chaat masala, a combination of spices that work together to create a symphony of taste explosions in even the simplest dish. Some flavors are bold and hit you immediately, while others only begin to entertain your taste buds seconds after you have taken the first bite. Then there are the lingering notes that hound you for hours after you have finished your meal, leaving you perplexed and pleased. Much like life, masala invites a combination of ups and downs, bitterness, spice, and sweetness that bring joy and interest to the every day.

With these contrasts, we can appreciate life with a greater sensibility. That’s why masala is about much more than just adding flavor to food. It is about living—and appreciating—every moment of our lives. Exploring curiosities, being adventurous learners, sharing laughter and comforts with friends and family, traveling to expose yourself to new experiences, and eating food rich with character and spice—to me, this is living a life rich with masala.

And so with this book, I’m sharing masala-infused recipes and stories meant to entertain your minds, warm your hearts, and fill your bellies. It’s my hope that you’ll have a greater understanding of how to live a life charged with masala, and bring it into your kitchens and homes.

The glimmer of Masala Farm began after a weekend trip to a friend’s farm in Vermont. My partner, Charlie Burd, and I started fantasizing about life in the country: a home with enough land to grow vegetables and fruit, to have a chicken coop and fresh farm eggs, to tend goats, and even to make cheese. We dreamt of how great it would be to create an environment where, like a great spice blend, people from all different backgrounds can mix together to share food, ideas, curiosities, and convictions.

After just a few short months of house hunting in 2005, Charlie and I found our home-to-be— a modest-size four-bedroom farmhouse with a gray slate roof and clapboard painted turmeric orange in upstate New York. With three ponds, a few barns, apple trees, and sixty-seven acres, it was perfect. (And I had no idea just how profound the effect would be on my cooking.) Our home, the American Masala Farm, has become a place where friends, chefs, and family from as near as next door or as far away as India can come to break bread, share stories, cook, and eat.

Our menus have become easier and more impromptu since moving here. This is a necessity, since we can never anticipate what is going to happen on the farm—a goat giving birth when we didn’t even know she was pregnant, stolen goslings, coyotes in the goat pasture, a pump in the well on the fritz—anything can happen at any time. Cooking has also become a communal exercise. We are almost always entertaining, be it one guest or one dozen, and we enjoy getting everyone who will sit at the table involved in creating the meal. This gives everyone ownership, something to talk about and reflect upon, and stories for the next dinner. It also leads to a very informal and comforting energy in the kitchen. Anyone who may have been shy about his or her kitchen skills quickly abandons any sense of bashfulness and starts exchanging ideas, jokes, and gossip with the rest of us.

Having a farm has also connected me to the seasons, nature, and the elements in a way I hadn’t experienced before. For instance, now I try to limit our foods to what’s available from nearby farms as much as possible. This means cooking becomes local in spirit and communal in the labor involved, making the meal about today and the friends and neighbors who have gathered around the table. I open my menu to specialty ingredients, too. From Pat and Albert Sheldon of Sheldon Farms and from Meg and Rob Southerland of Gardenworks, we buy butter imported from Parma, Italy; Swiss Gruyère; and Spanish Marcona almonds, as well as seasonal berries and fresh vegetables. Their shops enrich our country lifestyles with amazing not-so-local products that crowd our pantry and make meals that much more special. We enjoy watching the shocked expression on friends’ faces when they sit down to dinner at our table. Yes, we are farmers, and yes, we are in a rural setting, but we too have pantries with a global reach and gourmet ambitions. Dare I say we eat better north of Albany than we did in lower Manhattan? Rules and expectations have fallen by the wayside, and cooking has become as much about the joys of preparing a meal as it is about sitting down to relish it.

From the beginning, our plan was to use the property not as a weekend or summer retreat, like so many city-to-country transplants, but as our main residence. When many of our closest friends (and even some family members) heard this, they thought we had gone mad. How could two New York City boys who knew more about Prada than pitchforks possibly make it through a harsh country winter? Where would we do our grocery shopping in a place where sheep and goats certainly outnumber people? Would I finally learn how to drive a car, and if not, how would I expect to get around? In short, how would we survive?

Let’s backtrack for a minute, to where my love of the country life began. I spent my childhood in New Delhi, India, in a modern home with every modern convenience. My brother, sister, and I went to private school and played cricket. My mother took care of us kids and, under careful instruction and tutelage from my paternal grandmother, she managed our home, which often entailed planning elaborate dinner parties for my father, a government bureaucrat, as well as for relatives. Panditji, my family’s now retired yet still beloved and immensely gifted chef, was a fixture in our kitchen since long before I was born, and as far back as I can remember, I was his constant shadow. He taught me not just the ways of the kitchen but also, through his eyes, the ways of the world. During our time side by side at the stove, I learned about the world, religion, and the sanctity of life through his vivid stories and anecdotes. My favorites were about his country life in Faizabad, a village in the state of Uttar Pradesh. These tales sparked my fascination with rural India.

Then, when I was seven years old, my father was offered a teaching position in Nagpur in the northwestern state of Maharashtra. My family moved, yet Panditji, my teacher on so many levels, stayed behind to care for my grandmother’s home in New Delhi, so Mom took over the cooking for company and for us kids. By India’s standards, Nagpur, a city of a quarter million people, is thought of as being small and, in typical Indian fashion, had rural life endowed with chickens, goats, and cows, as well as rolling green hills and fields at every turn. I was enchanted by the nature of the city and routinely explored the hilly grounds around the stately manor we lived in, eager to have my own adventures to tell Panditji about.

After school one afternoon, I went exploring around the property and saw a beautiful baby goat alone in a field. It was love at first sight, and I decided to take her home with me. The frail little creature followed me to the house, and I created a bed for her from hay and fed her cereal, rice, and milk. That evening a man came to the house, asked for my father, and told him that one of his goats had gone missing. My father asked what he could do to help, and the farmer said, Sir, I believe your son has taken my goat. Imagine my father’s shock to walk into the garage and find me there with this humble farmer’s goat! Of course, the farmer took back his goat—and ever since then, I have always wanted my own goat (though I never imagined being a parent to four dozen of them!).

Common sense is an important country trait, and the best role model in this realm was my practical mother. A wonderful cook, Mom took over the cooking detail while we lived in Nagpur. We visited Cotton Market every week to purchase exactly twenty-five eggs—enough for my siblings and me to each have our daily egg and with plenty left over for weekend cravings and treats, be they omelets or cakes. Mom’s think-ahead approach to food and entertaining made it possible for us to eat regally for little cost and with little waste. She meticulously planned and rationed her ingredients, for it wasn’t possible to run out to the corner market if her supplies were depleted. She kept a cooking journal that not only included the recipes and meals she made, but also to whom she served what dish and how much was left over at the end of the meal. In this way, whenever she had to entertain guests, she could easily open her journal, jot down the precise amount of ingredients she needed for the number of guests expected, and have neither too much nor too little to serve. In addition, she impressed many of her guests by never offering the same dish twice, or by serving select others their favorite dish on every visit.

In New Delhi, Panditji taught me about traditions, classic dishes, and the history behind them; in Nagpur, Mom gave me an education in how to be a practical, savvy, and creative cook and host. And it was in Nagpur that I developed my fascination for farm animals like chickens and goats. I like to think that my cooking style today is a mishmash of these big influences.

Goats were a part of our everyday life in India, and while my childhood desire to raise a goat went unfulfilled, Charlie and I are more than making up for it now. We tend to our small herd with as much care and tenderness as I did as a boy, petting them, feeding them, and attending to them as the special, gentle, and smart creatures they are. Now that I have my own herd of LaManchas (plus an Angora goat and a few Oberhasli crossbreeds that are pets and don’t produce milk), I find that using the goats’ milk in my cooking is a grounding experience that connects me to the food chain and to India, reminding me that milk doesn’t come from cardboard cartons but from healthy, loved animals. This affection for farm animals has given me more strength to come to terms with the fact that many of the animals we are nurturing and caring for will end up on a dinner table at either our home or at my restaurant, Dévi, in New York City.

Now that I live in the country, I am forced to be smart about meal planning like Mom was, and like Panditji, I strive to wow and excite my guests, stimulate their senses, and stoke their appetites with the smell of toasted cumin, the color of bright saffron, and the spice of the Indian kitchen. I am constantly applying these lessons learned from my elders to my cooking at the farm.

In the summer when fresh berries and just-picked veggies are plentiful, it is heaven to have a country kitchen. I make thick blueberry jam from the berries that grow right outside my back door (as well as from the ones purchased at nearby farms) and an herby tomato marinara with the heirloom fruits from my garden. Finding inspiration isn’t difficult—it’s there in my garden, in our neighbors’ gardens, at the farmers’ markets, and dangling from the trees.

Besides writing cookbooks and running the restaurant, I am the chairperson of the Culinary Institute of America’s Asian Studies program, and as such I am constantly on the go, traveling across America promoting the flavors of India. I find travel and teaching completely inspiring and educational, and through my students’ questions and cooking anecdotes, I learn how they incorporate masala into their lives.

But although I thrive on educating those new to Indian spices, as well as Indophiles, about how to heighten the flavor of their favorite dishes with a few herbs, spices, or techniques, there is nothing more satisfying than returning home, where I turn off my BlackBerry, give e-mail a rest, and enjoy living and cooking in the country. When I come home from these teaching trips, my muscles untangle, my mind clears. As soon as the car brakes onto the gravel drive, I’m off, camera in hand, rushing to check on my girls—our 120-plus heritage-breed chickens.

We have a stunning assortment of chickens, like brown-spotted Buttercups with fiery orange-plumed necks and Silver-Spangled Hamburgs that look like the chicken incarnate of a Dalmatian. I love these coiffed divas and have taken to religiously documenting their lives on the farm through snapshots: walking through the fields, perching on a stump, peeking out the coop window. Once they realize that I’m an innocuous presence, some will even rest on my shoulder. The visit culminates in checking for eggs, collecting them in a bowl, and using them for that night’s egg curry dinner or in a simple breakfast scramble the next morning.

After visiting the chickens, I’ll check on one of my favorite goats, Geoffrey, who was a gift from Angela Miller, my literary agent and the proprietor of Consider Bardwell Farm in Vermont just fifteen minutes over the state line from us. Geoffrey has an incredible disposition and is friendly beyond what you would ever imagine possible for a goat. Charlie and I were so taken with his personality that we altered our original plan for the farm, deciding to raise goats instead of sheep, assuming that all goats would have what we like to call the Geoffrey gene (which we ultimately discovered they don’t). Needless to say, we still enjoy the fresh goat’s milk that we drink in our coffee and chai, turn into caramely cajeta, and cook with, too.

Sometimes after a trip away, I find myself hungry for the stunning just-harvested produce available at our many neighboring farm stands. Charlie and I might drive down Route 22 and supplement the bounty from our garden with that from Sheldon Farms, where we always buy sublime butter and sugar-sweet corn, as well as purple-speckled cranberries, green heirloom beans, and just-dug potatoes. We’ll often stop off at Gardenworks to add to our own harvest of blueberries and, if it’s a Sunday, maybe the farmers’ market in Dorset to visit some of our favorite produce farmers, cheesemakers, and meat purveyors. On the way home, we’ll swing by Battenkill Valley Creamery, where we’ll leave a few dollars in the cash box (they still work by the honor system) and pull some heavy cream (thicker and creamier than you could imagine), whole milk, or their incredible chocolate milk from the reach-in cooler.

During the wintertime, it’s a different story. Aside from my beloved chickens that produce eggs for our enjoyment year-round, there is no local harvest to support and visit. I am confined to the bounty of my cold storage and that of the local supermarket, which, I must say, has gotten much better throughout the years, now offering imported cheeses and other gourmet food items. Though it is massive in size, this supermarket is a far cry from the quality and selection of winter produce to which I was accustomed in Manhattan. These cold months are when my creativity really goes into overdrive and, like Mom in Nagpur, I have found that with little means I can make delicious meals.

My cooking has become more practical and less off-the-cuff than it once was. In New York City, dinner and groceries were always just a few steps from my front door. But in the country, food shopping happens far less often and must sustain meals over several days. This is to conserve fuel, our energy (rising at sunup with the chickens takes it toll), and my relationship with Charlie (since I don’t have a driver’s license, he’s the one who gets to shuttle me thirty miles to and from the store). During winter, I’ve learned to rely on the local supermarket for fruits and vegetables and on my stocked pantry for spices, dried beans, rice, and legumes, as well as the canned chutneys, jams, and vegetables that I preserved during the summer’s months of plenty.

Divided by seasons, the recipes in Masala Farm reflect our rural life. What each recipe has in common is my unique approach to introducing spice and excitement to food in unexpected ways. For example, deviled eggs (see recipe) get a dose of Indian sambhaar powder (similar to what many call curry powder) as well as a jalapeño for spice and crème fraîche for richness, while a fresh country ham (see recipe) gets a rubdown with soy sauce and rice wine before it heads into the oven for the better part of an afternoon. Enhancing flavors of classic recipes by introducing unexpected finishing oils, spice blends, marinades, rubs, and seasonings are the trademarks of my cooking. By offering the simplest twist on a classic recipe, like adding freshly ground black pepper to a quiche crust or fresh ginger and saffron to rhubarb jam, I’m serving up a new version of a traditional recipe that is at once deliciously modern yet still comforting and recognizable.

In each chapter, you’ll find a multitude of approachable, doable recipes, always light on the fuss and big on the flavor, using Indian techniques and flavors that bring an exciting freshness to the table. You’ll also gain insight into the comedy and honest reality of our everyday lives, as well as the Washington County community that we have become a part of and love dearly. This is the American countryside, masala style.

CHAPTER ONE

Spring

Anticipation, Patience, and Delicious Rewards

The animals are the first to alert us that spring is here. After taking shelter in the barns throughout many months of cold and snow, they get spring fever big time and ache to explore the land. The goats, sheep, and alpacas head to the pasture, and the ducks and geese make a beeline to the barns, where they gather hay to make nests for their soon-to-come babies.

When the geese and ducks first begin laying their eggs, Charlie and I take their eggs for selfish reasons—like frittatas, quiche, and banana pudding, to name a few. The geese will hiss when we come close to their nests, and then they do the funniest thing—they either roll over or get up and walk away! We grab the eggs and, easy as that, our morning shopping is done. Friends make special trips from afar just to get a taste of our fresh chicken, duck, and goose eggs from shells in the most beautiful colors, teal and pale gray-blue pastels to earthy clay hues and rose-tinted browns. Year-round we sell some of our bounty to Mrs. London’s and Max