Andy and I were determined not to leave India without taking at least one cooking class. Afterall, there’s no point falling in love with food that you can’t recreate at home.

Our first opportunity came in the lakeside city of Udaipur in Rajasthan. While there are a lot of cooking classes to choose from, we opted to go with the Spice Box, a local spice store whose owner, Shanthi, runs vegetarian cooking lessons on the side.

The class covers a number of popular Indian dishes, including palak paneer, malai kofta, vegetable biryani, chapati and vegetable cutlets, as well as spiced masala chai, and Kashmiri saffron tea.

With so many dishes being taught in around three hours, the experienced Shanthi moves the class along at a fast pace. This is not a problem, however, as you receive a copy of the recipes and take turns to make the different dishes so the techniques are easy to remember.

I found the class really useful. While I’ve always loved Indian food, I’m not good at deciphering the different spices that are present in a finished meal. Learning the dishes from scratch gave me a whole new insight into why dishes taste the way they do.

Khadai paneer home-style - all capsicum and paneer, just the way I like it

Throughout the class we picked up lots of interesting information about Indian cooking. For example, masala chai is always made with Assam tea, and home cooked Indian food is very different from the food you find in restaurants, using far more vegetables and far less sauce.

Whipping up a palak paneer

I was also surprised at how fast the curries were to make. I’ve always been taught that curries need to be simmered for hours, but that doesn’t make a lot of sense when you consider that a home cook has many other demands on their time.

My favourite dish of the class was the malai kofta. The sauce was delicious, using lots of interesting spices like green cardamon (reserved for sweet and milky sauces), aniseed, cinnamon, white poppy seeds and watermelon seeds. And I was fascinated to learn that you make the unspiced, deep-fried potato dumplings separately from the sauce, and only combine them at the end.

Taming the chapati

One of the most fun dishes to make was chapati. After making and rolling the dough, we transferred it on to a hot pan to cook where it quickly puffed up into a delicious bread.

The best part of the course was eating the delicious finished products at the end of the lesson, although as the only two in the class we couldn’t finish the food no matter how hard we tried.

This class was ideal for beginners who want to get better acquainted with classic North Indian dishes. As Shanthi says, the only thing you need to bring to the lesson is a bottle of water and a big appetite.

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