Cooks & Books: Darjeeling Express' Asma Khan for Monsoon

"The soul of my cooking is the symphonic layering of vibrant flavours that work together like instruments in an orchestra." ~ Asma Khan

Asma Khan is the owner of the beloved Darjeeling Express restaurant in London and one of the UK's most prominent female chefs. She has been revolutionising the London restaurant scene since 2017 with her world-renowned Indian food, all-female team, and her commitment to training immigrant women.

Now, the internationally renowned chef and award-winning author returns to Edinburgh to demonstrate, talk and dish out tasters for Monsoon. This is a masterclass on building flavour in your cooking through the intuitive principles of Indian cookery.

Structured around the six core ayurvedic tastes, namely: Tangy, Bitter, Hot, Sweet, Sour, and Salty and how they correlate to the six seasons in Bengal, this book aims to illuminate Indian cookery by giving you the foundations you need to build balanced flavours, dishes and sumptuous feasts.

With core techniques including roasting, grinding and tempering spices, how to cook with ghee, chillies, and onions, and what to add and when to re-balance flavours in a dish, Asma will empower homecooks to apply fundamental processes intuitively to their cooking. Including 80 flavourful recipes for Chicken Cooked in Pickling Spices and Slow-cooked Lamb with Vinegar, to the more veg-forward Pumpkin Dal, and Rice Pulao with Oranges, this book seeks to honour traditional cooking techniques and ayurvedic principles, and ground them in the modern kitchen.