Culinary Terms

Bake—To cook by dry heat, usually in a closed chamber or oven. Baking has not been a very popular technique of cooking food in most parts of India. The tandoor (clay oven) used in Punjab for preparing whole-meal baked bread or roasting chicken or fish is a sort of an oven and a griller combined together.

Whole lamb is sometimes cooked in an oven improvised by burning fire in a covered pit.

Baste—To pour melted fat or gravy with a ladle, from time to time, over meat or other food whilst roasting or during cooking; for example, nargisi koftas are basted with the gravy when they are simmering on slow fire.