Kochi Marriott celebrates the Awadhi cuisine with Chef Mohammed Asif Qureshi!
Popularly known as one of the culinary capitals of India, Lucknow features the unique “courtly cuisine”, the Awadhi food consisting of distinctive qormas, biryanis and kebabs. Kochi Marriott celebrates this cuisine with Chef Mohammed Asif Qureshi from Courtyard by Marriott Bhopal with a unique food festival starting from 27 th April till 6 th May 2018 at Kochi Kitchen for dinner between 07:00 pm till 11:00pm and for Awadhi special Sunday Brunch on 29th April and 6th May between 12:30 pm till 04:00 pm.
The festival will feature Chef Quereshi who hails from a generation that still recalls the rigorous work involved in cooking for large numbers. He can give you the exact number of rotis, for instance, that 10 kg of wheat flour will produce. Chef Qureshi has looked back nostalgically at the day when he accompanied his grandfather for cooking at a wedding as a child and from there his passion for cooking emerged. He has more than 13 years of experience in the culinary field with a specialty in Indian Curry, Tandoor & Awadhi. Chef Qureshi would feature dishes like Awadhi Galouti Kebab,Makai Chuimui, Paneer Pasanda, Band Gosht, the ever popular Awadhi Biriyani, Murgh Barra, Lucknowi Nehari and the end on a sweet note with an array of desserts including Pakiza.
Awadhi food, is far more than roti and boti (bread and meat). Discover the fabulous qormas that we associate with the cuisine display a very sophisticated sense of spicing, which makes the cuisine at once distinctive from other similar cuisines. “Overpowering flavours are not used in Awadhi courtly food; instead a balance of flavours is achieved by intricately combining different types of spices. “Garlic, for instance, is never used in any dish where we use saffron," points out Chef Qureshi. The pungency of the ingredient kills any subtlety of other spices. So Awadhi chefs will, or should, always work with separate ginger and garlic pastes, freshly made, using garlic much more infrequently in their creations than ginger, adds chef Quereshi. A cookery class is also organized with Chef Qureshi on 2 nd May at the hotel.
About Awadhi Cuisine:
Uttar Pradesh, was christened by the British as the "United Provinces of Agra and Oudh". 'Oudh' or Avadh, with its capital in Faizabad was an important Mughal outpost with considerable territory and cultural dominance. As Avadh grew in importance, a distinct, refined courtly culture developed influenced by the sophistication of the Persians. Hindu and Muslim influences came together to foster a highly stylized culture including a stylized cuisine, marked by the skill and creativity of cooks and the hyperbolic lavishness of plates. Food played an important role in diplomacy, with the cooks of the nawabs creating newer dishes from older Mughal ones, not merely to impress their patrons (the Muslim nobility as well as the Kayastha administrators) but also the British residents and visitors from other princely states who had to be entertained.
