8 things you can add to your dishes that will elevate them from the floor labeled “this is good” to the penthouse labeled “OMG this is amaklamatic, how did you make this?”
Also, most of these ingredients are things that don’t seem to be game-changing by themselves but do absolute magic when added to a dish during the cooking process
1. Tomato sauce - Save all those sachets of tomato sauce from your Swiggy deliveries and add them to any tomato-based dish. Actual fresh tomatoes are quite unpredictable and, at least in urban India, routinely bland.
Tomato sauce is concentrated tomato paste with a ton of added flavours. It has vinegar to compensate for the tomatoes’ unpredictable acidity, sugar and salt to amplify flavours and onion and garlic powders to lend that addictive snacky taste.
The best Makhani gravy for butter chicken/paneer etc will more often than not feature tomato sauce.
2. Maggi masala - the most universal pan-Indian spice mix that will evoke no region in particular, and every dish in general. You can add this to anything other than a dessert and it will improve it. Plus it has starch thickeners, so it’s a fantastic way to rescue a watery dal
3. Pickle (Achaar) - if you think your gravy is a bit too bland, just drop in some pickle gravy. The mustard oil flavoured with all those spices and salt will hold the sagging face of your bland dish and sucker punch it to the other side of Europa.
Now for some inspiration from overseas, particularly South East Asia and Mexico
4. Canned anchovies - when frying oil at the start of a dish, in addition to spices, drop 1-2 anchovies and blend them in. Your final dish won’t taste fishy & it will add a tremendous umami boost to whatever it is you are cooking.
You can also rehydrate traditional sun-dried fishes from coastal India, such as nethili karuvaadu and do this.
5. Shrimp paste is another neutron star of densely packed umami that you can drop into most dishes. One of the reasons Thai food’s flavours linger in your mouth is the use of shrimp paste along with garlic, chillies, ginger (or galangal) and basil in most dishes.
Think of the shrimp paste as the slow-motion button that extends the duration of the high-intensity flavour disco party in your mouth.
6. Fish sauce - if you want to add salt and umami, you could use sodium chloride and monosodium glutamate. Or you could just add fish sauce.
7. Miso paste - fermented soy paste that adds both thickness and umami to any dish. And it lasts forever in your fridge
8. Chipotle chillies in adobo sauce - The chipotle chillies are just smoked Jalapeños, and the adobo sauce features a ton of spices that are extremely common in Indian food, and the overall combination is an utterly heavenly combination of heat, smokiness and flavourbombness.
And every single one of these is either available easily locally or on Amazon (Miso, Chipotle/Adobo, Shrimp paste)
If you know of other magical flavour boosting ingredients that are not in this list, please let me know!
More flavourbombs 👇🏼
Marmite/Vegemite/Yeast Extract: All of these are essentially dense sources of glutamates
Also these (similar to Chipotle/Adobo sauce)
And these
And yes, bouillon cubes, which includes meat stock, veg stock and MSG
And yes, Bacon
