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6 Episodes 2013 - 2013
Episode 1
59 mins
Chef Rick Stein starts his voyage trough India's cuisines and search for the best curry by asking what that term means in Calcutta, pointing out the British Indian restaurants are usually run by Bangladeshis. Rick enjoys real West Bengal cooking in the buzzing, dirt-poor metropolis, a creation of colonialism. Next it's off to Madras (now Chennai), the center of trade in spices and especially curry-y mixtures, no wonder it's dishes are extremely spicy, but also to his taste.
Episode 2
59 mins
Rick presents colonial creation Bolbay (now Mumbai) and its near-cosmopolitan cuisine, fitting the subcontinents rich success-magnet, yet boarded with immense slums. All around, he finds and appreciates curries, often with colonial backgrounds, as in an exclusive club which remained Europeans-only until the 1960s. Then to Pondichery, long a French enclave in British India, which maintains a far more Gallic-flavored cuisine.
Episode 3
59 mins
Rick visits southern India, starting in rice state Tamil Nadu where he learns about ritual and home-cooked festival-related foods in Madurai, the city of Hindu temples. Next to Kerala, a favorite tourist destination, extremely wet and fertile, hence rich in produces, especially tea and many spices, which are also exceptionally abundant in its cuisine.
Episode 4
59 mins
Rick is in northern India for rich, refined non-Hindu gastronomy. Lucknow, the city of major Moghul 'nawabs' (princes), the opulent court started a Persian-inspired tradition of subtle cooking with minimal use of spices. Next to the subcontinent's granery Punjab, fertile land of Sikhs, with a richly varied tradition. Rick marvels at home-cooking and the social fabric-functions of cooking for religious festivals, stresses to majority part of vegetarian dishes in most Indian househlds and sits in a regional TV cooking competition jury.
Episode 5
59 mins
Rick Stein cooks a Biryani fit for a royal banquet after a visiting Rajasthan.
Episode 6
59 mins
As his journey comes to an end, Rick Stein reveals the outcome of his search for the perfect curry.