Reply to Why is Indian food always expensive?

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Indian good is expensive because it requires certain expertise, equipment and spices, none of which are cheap. It also is expensive because people are willing to pay what the restaurants charge. [/quote]
Not true except for a few specific dishes. Your run of the mill palak paneer, butter chicken and naan are very easy to make.[/quote]

That does not even begin to explore the very wide world of Indian cuisine. It’s patently untrue that “except for a few specific dishes”, the rest do not require expertise, equipment or spices.

Do try to make a Dal baati churma or Soan papdi, and report back on how easy they’re to make (and before you go there, these are but two examples of hundreds of dishes that are difficult to make).[/quote]
Silly argument. No one in India makes soan papdi at home. You buy it from the halwai. When I was a kid growing up in India there would be vendors cycling around the neighborhood carrying the feathery sweet in big glass jars. We’re talking about typical Indian restaurant fare in the US.[/quote]

I have eaten a soan/halwa combo dessert at a restaurant; was quite good although I don’t really like either separately. I found it rather dismissive to say that with a few exceptions, Indian food is easy to make, when it is likely the other way around, or 50-50.

My point is that just because you can make some sort of bastardized version of some Indian dishes at home does not mean that the actual ones, served at many restaurants, are not time/labor/ingredient intensive.

Take butter chicken, for instance. The dish is believed to be created to use up leftover tandoori chicken. As such, you’ll have to first make tandoori chicken, and then use it to make butter chicken, which let’s just say that “crockpot butter chicken” is  most decidedly not doing.  Of course, since most of us don’t have a tandoor, if we bake the chicken, you’d then have to take the extra step of infusing the curry with a little smoke to emulate the authentic flavor. If a restaurant charges 20 bucks for a butter chicken and they’re serving the real deal, I’d call that a bargain. [/quote]
90% of the restaurants are baking the chicken in the oven and using a frozen sauce base among other shortcuts. [/quote]

Using a frozen sauce base isn’t really a shortcut, poster. At some point the kitchen staff made that base, and it took a good long while. When they finish using that batch in the freezer, they’ll spend hours making a new one.

Batch cooking certain things like that happens in all cuisine kitchens, you aren’t getting a totally fresh product made for your order when you order Italian, French, Portuguese, Spanish, I could go on and on with cuisines that have sauce based dishes. I mean obviously, the Sunday gravy takes hours to meld into something divine and worth paying good money for.[/quote]
It’s not complicated to make.[/quote]

May or may not be complicated. Depends on what they're making. But it's almost always time consuming. [/quote]

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