stuff
some high smoke-point oil, like avocado, canola, sunflower or vegetable oil
5 whole green cardamom pods
3/4 cup cashews, ideally roasted and unsalted
(optional) a fistful of any random trail mix you have, minus chocolate or candy. so any mix of cranberries, raisins, almonds, walnuts, peanuts, sunflower seeds
1 big yellow onion
5 whole cloves
1 inch cinnamon stick
5 cloves garlic
1 inch ginger
1 box of firm tofu
(optional) 1/2 tsp garam masala
tools
blender
food processor
chef's knife
cutting board
wok or big wide pan
prep
peel the ginger
peel the garlic
peel and chop the onion roughly. we're gonna blend it so don't bother being nice and precise
use a sharp WHACK with the heel of your palm to break the cinnamon stick
what do
1. Boil 2 cups of water. Take half the cashews and put them in a bowl. Pour the boiling water over and let sit while you do everything else.
2. Heat oil in a pan on high.
3. Break open the cardamom pods with your fingers so you can see the sticky aromatic black seeds inside. Throw the opened pods, seed + husk, in the hot oil.
4. Throw in the rest of the cashews and trail mix, if using.
5. Watch like a hawk! Cashews burn incredibly easily, so stir when you see the small bits of cashew getting brown.
6. When you think the cashews (or other nuts) might possibly burn, dump in the onions and STIR STIR STIR! Also half a teaspoon of salt to draw liquid out of the onions.
7. Lower the heat and get the onions translucent and soft. We don't want them browning and certainly not getting charred at all. Not even close.
8. Once the onions are soft and translucent, transfer everything to the blender and VROOOOM. Add a bit of water if the mixture is too thick or there's not enough for the blades to catch on and really get going. Blend it quite a lot: you want to end up with a super duper smooth paste, almost smoothie. Keep the blender flask close to your stove because you'll need it in a hurry in a couple steps.
9. Put the garlic and ginger in the food processor and WHIIRRRR until it's all chopped up.
10. Maybe add a tad more oil to the (now empty) pan. Add cloves and cinnamon. Wait until you can smell their aroma, maybe 30s. Add the chopped ginger and garlic.
11. Watch like a hawk! Small bits of ginger and garlic burn so, so easily. They are delicate dewdrops disappearing at dawn. They are fragile creatures, newborn babes being devoured by a fiery dragon. You want to heat them to get rid of rawness and to coax that beautiful cooked aromatic flavor out, but you are Icarus, flying close to the sun. Don't get too close. As soon as you see even a bit of browning start to appear, dump in the blended onion-nut paste to arrest the browning and bring the temperature down.
12. Stir and scrape up anything stuck to the bottom of the pan.
13. Take the soaked cashews from step 1, add a bit more water and blend until very very smooth.
14. Dump this blended cashew liquid (cashew milk I guess? idk) in the pan and stir.
15. Adjust salt.
16. Cut the tofu into tiny little cubes and fold into the sauce.
17. If using, sprinkle garam masala on top.
why this works
This recipe uses the whole-spices-in-oil technique twice, once with cardamom + nuts, once again with cloves, cinnamon and ginger-garlic. The cardamom ends up getting blended, while the cloves and cinnamon are left whole. You could just as reasonably put the cloves, cinnamon and cardamom all in the first step and blend everything. If you do that, use less cloves and cinnamon since you will end up with a LOT more of them dispersed throughout the sauce. I like to keep them whole because I think it's aesthetic to have a few inedible pieces of whole spices dispersed through a rich sauce like this. I'm a weirdo, sue me. I like the cardamom blended in though because it's a gentler, more subtle spice and I think it's important to get the most out of it.The nuts, trail mix and cardamom are tempered in hot oil. The heat gets flavors out of these ingredients and into the oil. The nuts brown, creating complex new flavors. Raisins and cranberries might brown or even caramelize. All of this works because nuts, whole spices and dried fruit are so low in moisture that they can get hot enough for those reactions without having to boil off a bunch of water first, a consequence of facts 2 and 3 from the water post.
The onions arrest the burning because they are so bulky and mostly water: facts 3 and 4 from the water post.
Heating ginger and garlic at high temperatures creates new rich flavors.
The onion-nut paste is used to arrest the burning of the ginger and garlic.
Soaking the cashews makes them much less grainy when blended, but soaked cashews cannot be tempered effectively because they have too much water. So I soak half and temper half. Shrug emoji I think this is reasonable and produces a great result but I'd love to hear from people who think I'd be better off just tempering everything, or some other way of treating the problem.
variations
Add a sliced hot green chili pepper with the onions to up the heat. Use a small, very spicy pepper to maintain the creamy white color of the sauce.
As I said above, put all the whole spices in before the onions. This gets rid of the large inedible pieces in the final result. Reduce quantities a bit.
Simplify: add the garlic and ginger right after the onions. Skip the second tempering step. Blend, then return to pan. This is every so slightly less flavorful but also less work. More generally, when you read recipes, ask, How can I make this simpler, at the potential cost of losing some flavor? How can I add some flavor, at the potential cost of adding complexity? Don't assume that the recipe author has picked a point on the complexity-flavor frontier that is optimal for you. The recipe might not even be on the frontier! There might be free gains, in that there might be the possibility of doing less work but achieving the same flavor, or getting more flavor without any more work. Use your big brain and don't assume recipe authors are infallible.
Add complexity: blend two tomatoes along with the cashews in step 13. This makes the sauce more umami, more acidic, and more like a butter chicken or tikka masala gravy. To keep going along that path, add red chili powder and coriander powder. When? As early as with the onions, but later is fine as well, as long as you heat through to make sure the powdered spices are cooked.
Other directions of complexity: add blended roasted bell peppers, blended cooked mushrooms, or blended rehydrated dried mushrooms. Steal ideas from hummus.
Swap out the tofu: use roasted sweet potato, roasted potato, pan-seared squash, roasted eggplant, grilled or pan-seared asparagus. Steal ideas from Thai curries.
