How to Dry Roast Cumin Seeds

Series Summary

Indian cuisine is distinguished by its sophisticated use of spices and herbs. But, you don't necessarily have to trek out to a restaurant to experience the exotic combination of flavors which delight taste buds around the globe. Simple ingredients like fresh vegetables and the fact that most dishes are made from scratch means that Indian food recipes are wholesome, healthy, fresh and non-processed.

A Raita or pachadi is a traditional Indian condiment based on yogurt and used as a sauce or dip. In this free video series, an Indian chef will teach you how to cook cucumber Raita from start to finish, and how to follow this simple, delicious recipe. You'll learn how to dry roast cumin seeds, cut cucumbers, vegetables, and onions, and add yogurt and spices to complete the sauce. The recipe is easy to follow and cook, but the results are out of this world. Learn a traditional Indian dish today!

Video Transcript

"Hi my name is Alan Diwan. I'm the chef and owner of Kashmir Indian Restaurant Budapest. We're here on behalf of expect today?s. And now we're going to make a very special raita. Raita is a yogurt salad and it goes very well with spicy food, because Indian food is usually spicer and we use the raita to mellow the spicy food down and to give it a nice compliment to some of the spicy dishes and it can go very well with Britani, with a chicken Britani or many sort of Britani. For this I'm going to use, we want to bring out the flavor of the cumin for this dish so that's why I'm going to use cumin seeds, we really want to bring out the flavor of the cumin in the raita so what I'm going to do is, I'm going to dry roast a little of the cumin on a very hot pan and we're just going to roast it for one or two minutes just until it slightly changes the color. The reason we're doing this is we want the essential oils from the cumin seeds to come out and then we're going to cool it down and then we're going to slightly powder this cumin seeds and this will give it a very nice very amazing flavor. So as you can see it only takes a few minutes or a few seconds actually max a minute and it has already changed its color. Now what we want to do is put it on a cool plate because we want to stop the cooking procedure here. Because other wise its going to cook its going to over heat and if it overcooks then the flavor is going to slightly change and its going to give a slightly bitter flavor. And we're going to leave our cumin seeds to dry and in the mean time we're going to prepare the next ingredients of the dish."