Sanjay Kumar of the Nirvana Restaurant on Albert Road explains why we don’t get invited to many parties and the reasons why we love our balti
Within the vicious and cut-throat closed of British curryhouse cooks there exists a small irritating minority of snobs, chefs and linecooks who laugh derisively at those of us who love the balti curry. They think only common and ignorant ‘English customers’ order balti on the menu. We don’t like food snobs at Nirvana because we think the balti is one of finest creations of the curryhouse world. A person who opts for our club balti is choosing a superior curry; muscular, robust, aromatic and full of gutsy flavour.
At Nirvana we love our balti and can get quite passionate about this curry which emerged during the heydays of the 80’s. The Nirvana crew once had to drag our inebriated Tandoori Chef out of an Iftar party in the back of Brick Lane. It seems our boy became somewhat miffed when an oily little Bangladeshi chef working at one of those hideously expensive, pretentious places in London suggested that a balti wasn’t actually an authentic Indian curry. In reply our Tandoori Chef tried to stab the little man with a shrimp fork through his tongue. A truly terrible scene ensued. As we dragged our man to safety he screamed out using gutter-language Hindi that all balti-haters were ‘jungle peasants with rough habits. You people are rubbish. Rubbish!’ he screamed like a demented nanny. ‘You’re all half castes, the bastard children who don’t know the food of their own motherlands, think you know better. You don’t. You never will. Fuc.......’
Our boys are not invited to many Iftar parties these days. Our wretched Tandoori chef ensured we are forever viewed as drunks, deviants and misfits by our curryhouse peers. Oh well. Stuff happens.
The balti was concocted by Pakistani restaurateurs in Birmingham during the 80’s. Snobs like that horrible oily little Bangladeshi our tandoori chef tried to stab like to joke that balti means bucket but those who take their balti’s seriously know that the dish is named after the heavy dome-shaped wok in which the curry is cooked. Actually.
The Nirvana balti is made with fresh meat, king prawns, shrimps or vegetables cold marinated in forest spices, added to a slow-cooked medium-thick sauce of caramelised white onions and garlic, green stem ginger, curry leaves, roasted tomatoes, fresh ground spices and, most importantly, fresh coriander leaves and stalks. Plenty of coriander stalks. A curry house chef’s balti recipe is distinctive by the way he assembles the dish. He never divulges this to anyone; not even his wife. It’s a treasured, sacred secret.
Our balti dish is rather special and cooked by our Head Chef; the genius tyrant who commands our kitchens. Very briefly, in Nirvana work culture the Head Chef prepares and cooks only special House dishes; these are curry dishes he and his team have perfected and modified since they began cooking in British curryhouses in 1962.
For our Head Chef to insist on personally cooking our balti is an indication of how much he loves this wonderfully punchy, robust and incredibly satisfying curry.
The only people who know the exact recipe of our balti is our Head Chef and his right-hand man, the Tandoori Chef, who is also responsible for marinating the balti meat. The only thing any of us know know about our balti is that somewhere along the cooking process our Head Chef adds a mixture of satkora (a type of South Asian grapefruit) juice and rind, tamarind pulp, and a dash of Worcestershire sauce which gives our balti a slight but distinctive tangy taste. It goes down so well with a glass of Merlot or a pint of summer ale.
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Kitchen gossip has it that our Head Chef won the recipe from a brilliant (but spiritually flawed) Pakistani curryhouse linecook during a game of poker. It was 1983 and they were playing in Bradford, in a dingy flat next door to a brothel. Both establishments were owned by Chinese Triads. On that auspicious day India, under the captainship of Kapil Dev, won the third Cricket World Cup at Lords. It was a good day for Indian cricket and a very good day for our Head Chef who walked away with his winning balti recipe. Head Chef practiced relentlessly with his hard-won recipe until he got his balti just right.
Our balti is served with basmati pilau rice, not naan bread (let us know if you prefer naan bread instead. It’s your balti, devour it your way). Our Tandoori Chef is adamant the tradition of eating a balti with naan bread started when 80’s Yuppies discovered the joys of eating leftover balti for lunch at work. ‘Best cure for a hangover,’ he says. And he should know the old lush. It seems the spice rush rejuvenated the Yuppies and their productivity increased at work. The Yuppies used the naan bread to scoop up the balti using one hand while yapping on their newly acquired gadget called a mobile phone with the other.
In curryhouse tradition a balti is classified as a dish belonging to the Anglo-Indian school of cookery.
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