Six Spices: A Simple Concept of Indian Cooking Paperback – February 25, 2014

Shortly after I became a vegetarian, I became very bored of bland vegetables and beans. Then one of my friends kept bringing her mother's Indian cooking over and I was instantly in love and decided vegetarian dishes really can taste much better than meat dishes. Whenever I asked her for the recipes, she would say they were very complicated or I would never find the ingredients or she doesn't even know because none of it is written down. So I began my own search for vegetarian Indian recipes and was becoming very frustrated at the laundry list of ingredients they all required. Stumbling across this book was a true blessing. Here's what I love about this book:- ORGANIZATION: This cookbook has the best organization of any cookbook I have seen. Each chapter features a cooking technique and all the recipes from the chapter use this technique. Each chapter also has similar types of recipes (like Chapter 2 is mostly vegetables, Chapter 3 is mostly dals, etc.). At the beginning of each chapter is a short list of spices and fresh ingredients. As long as you have these on hand, most recipes will only require one or two additional ingredients.- INFORMATIVE AND CONCISE: The author provides enough information without making the reading overwhelming. Each chapter begins with an introduction and helpful tips necessary to make the recipes in that chapter. Then each recipe has an English name and Indian name and a sentence or two on how to prepare and serve the recipe. The last chapter called Tips and Techniques has a lot of useful information too, and should probably be read first. This cookbook is more than just a book of recipes.- UNIQUE RECIPES: The recipes are similar enough to each other that you do not need an abundance of ingredients, yet they are all very unique. I really like how the author focuses on changing the main ingredient but keeping the spices relatively consistent. This allows you to eat a variety of different foods without spending too much money on ingredients you rarely use.- EASY TO FIND INGREDIENTS: While there are some ingredients which can only be found in Indian grocery stores, this book uses relatively few compared to other books I've seen. The ingredients used in this book which are not easy to find are: ghee, asafetida, curry leaves, paneer, and some dals. There are some other ingredients, but they don't appear in many recipes.- VEGGIE-FRIENDLY: This isn't a book for vegans, but vegetarians will love it. When I was first looking for an Indian cookbook, I was limiting my search to books with vegetarian in the title. I'm glad I broadened my search because this book is nearly all vegetarian recipes. The meat recipes are almost all in Chapter 5, leaving Chapters 2, 3, 4, and 6 full of vegetarian recipes. There are great seasoned vegetables ranging from corn and potatoes to okra and mustard greens. There's a recipe for almost all beans and dals.- LOOK AND DESIGN: The book is very pretty and colorful. It has pictures throughout but you can tell they are not used as fillers. The book conveniently lies flat so that it's easy to read while cooking. The font and layout for the recipes is consistent and readable.This book is one of my two favorite Indian cookbooks. My other favorite is Flavors of India by Shanta Nimbark Sacharoff. Happy cooking :)

We love Indian food and I wanted to get a gentle introduction to cooking it. Starting with 6 spices seemed a good way to do that. That turned out to be spot on. In the 3 weeks i've had this book I've tried 10 recipes. While not all of them will become favorites, not a one was less than good.This book isn't just about reproducing authentic Indian food, but more about using Indian style cooking and flavors with ingredients I can get at the local market. That's fine. Since I've never been to India, i wouldn't know authentic if it bit me. I do know when I'm getting tasty food and with that Neeta Saluja comes through. What's more, the recipes are straight forward to prepare. Also, the instructions are clear. I would appreciate photos of each dish, but that's a minor quibble and doesn't distract from my enthusiastic recommendation of this cookbook.Another plus is that many of the dishes are vegetarian, and I've been wanting to move more in that dietary direction. What I don't want is to simply substitute tofu and soy meat for things I'm used to eating. Yuck. With the new tastes I'm experiencing and with dishes that are intended to take advantage of their natural ingredients, the lack of meat is not taste a problem at all. Healthy is a byproduct of good food, not an idea imposed upon dishes that weren't developed for vegetable based ingredients.

Wanting to eat healthier food, I decided to learn to cook my favorite: Indian. I began with this book. I read the intro section of each chapter, which gave me a good sense of how a lot of Indian cooking works, in general. I selected one dal, a rice dish, and a main course recipe from the book, bought the ingredients, and cooked them up on a Sunday. My husband and I ate these with relish. So good! I made some lunch packs for the freezer, and ate leftovers off and on throughout the week. This has become the routine, now, and I am eating way more "real" food as a result. By the way, a big majority of the recipes are vegetarian, vegan, or can be made vegan by substituting oil for ghee. For variety, I like to use quinoa or brown rice in instead of white rice (although basmati really does taste wonderful). Oh, and you might like to know that you may need more than six different spices in your cupboard to cook regularly out of this book, but never more than six for any given recipe. Contrast this with a recipe I made from another great book (Raghavan Iyer's 660 Curries) that required 17. Enjoy!

This is an excellent introduction to use different types of cooking by blooming spices on to Indian cooking. It really depends how each dish or recipe is being prepared, cooked with varying degree of spices, chili powders, and other unique herbs and ingredients.I enjoyed this book especially decoding different techniques on indian cooking. This is the book that I am looking for since I knew an Indian chef who knows how to flavor well his cooking with only 6 spices. I am a garde manger by profession but I am.also a food blogger that makes recipes, new techniques to make simple & great food.

Good introduction to Indian cooking, but I ended up returning it because I felt I'd outgrow it pretty quickly. There wasn't much about tempering spices here, and not many new combinations I could play with.

We moved from a major metropolitan area with world class ethnic cuisine readily available, to a more remote area with few "world class" restaurants of any kind. This book has helped us to satisfy our craving for great Indian food. I have made more recipes from this book than Julia Childs' book. It is so great the way the techniques are broken down, and it really motivates experimentation. I now own a masala dabba, and love using it. If you like to cook, and love Indian food, don't hesitate. Buy this book!