At Chicago's Coach House, James Beard Award-nominated chef Zubair Mohajir shares dishes from his home in Chennai and across the South Asian subcontinent. Mohajir and his team use recipes that are hundreds of years old to educate patrons on South Indian cooking, with dishes like duck Numidian, soft shell crab chaat, a "taco" with mahi-mahi varuval, and more.
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00:00So we're going to grab the duck that has been curing for about 16 hours.
00:07So the last course on our tasting menu is the duck numidian.
00:10The first step of this process is to wash the cure off of the duck.
00:14We're going to set it up to confit.
00:16This is cured with a little bit of pink curing salt,
00:19some reshampati chilies, which are from South India,
00:22cumin, coriander, cardamom, a little bit of nutmeg and fenugreek.
00:28It's a dish that's inspired by a recipe that's 927 years old,
00:32from pre-crusade southern Spain.
00:34It's one of the most labor-intensive dishes that we have in-house.
00:38As Indian cooks, we always go to work in French restaurants
00:41before we go anywhere else,
00:43so a sachet is something that we learn how to infuse
00:46the flavors of the spices without losing the spices
00:49into whatever you're cooking it in.
00:51So we're going to go cinnamon,
00:53some South Indian chilies there,
00:56cardamom, clove, cumin, black mustard seed,
00:59another very South Indian flavor that's very distinct,
01:03very different from North India, of course.
01:05Same with fenugreek as well.
01:07Black pepper and fennel.
01:10And then lastly, some turmeric.
01:12For Italians, there's pasta. For Indians, there's spices, right?
01:15This is our core. It's really the foundation of everything that we do.
01:18Afterwards, we're going to set it up in this hotel pan
01:21with our 4-year-old duck fat.
01:23This fat comes from the past almost 4 years of us cooking this duck.
01:27Every week, the fresh batches of duck replenishes this duck fat.
01:31So essentially, if we do our jobs, we should never run out of duck fat.
01:35So this duck is going to go in for 5 hours.
01:38I'm going to pull it and debone it in a little bit.
01:41I was born in Chennai in South India.
01:44South Indian cooking is a big part of what we do.
01:47The Coach House is a 22-seat tasting menu
01:50where I get to explore not only where I am from
01:53in regards to my cultural upbringing,
01:56but also the experiences that I've had as a cook up till this point.
02:03So we're going to make our red rice khichdi.
02:06Khichdi is a very old-school kind of homey dish.
02:09So this is going to be another component of that duck dish that we're working on.
02:12The first step in it, we basically toast our rice and our spices together.
02:16So that's what we're going to do here with some butter.
02:19Red rice is used for a really beautiful khichdi.
02:22Khichdi has different phases of basically, if you overcook it a little bit longer,
02:25it almost becomes like this porridge that people also eat in the South.
02:28So our khichdi is South Indian, made with red rice, lentils.
02:31It has a very risotto-ish bite to that red rice.
02:36So it helps our guests connect with something that they're familiar with
02:39when it comes to the texture of food.
02:42But then at the same time, we're just blasting with something that they've never had before.
02:46I'm going to add garlic, ginger, shallot, and serranos.
02:51We kind of call this like the holy trinity, if you will, of Indian food.
02:55There's always garlic, ginger, serranos, and shallot in something.
02:59You can't do anything without it.
03:01So we're going to add a little bit of water to this
03:04so we can start the rice cooking now that everything is toasted together.
03:07And we finish it with yogurt a little bit later.
03:11This next course right now, we're preparing the soft-shelled chaat.
03:14Over here we've got some nice live soft-shell.
03:16I'm going to be cleaning it by cutting the eyes and face off, cleaning the gills.
03:20This gets then dipped in a batter that is inspired by a Thai-style chicken batter.
03:24So this is going to get that nice soft, crispy soft-shell flavor.
03:27And we're making a bunch of salsas that will be garnishing it.
03:31Chaat is one of those kind of attacks on all of your senses when you eat.
03:34It's one of the most popular street foods in India.
03:36It's one of the most popular street foods in India.
03:38Every corner of every city has a chaat dude.
03:40It's usually some sort of potatoes, chickpeas, layered with rice puffs,
03:44layered with peanuts, chilies, lentils, crispy lentil noodles, yogurt salsas, mint chutney.
03:50All right, so over here we have our nice rice flour batter.
03:53As we had cleaned it up earlier, what I like to do right now is just go right in half
03:57and right into the batter.
03:58So these are individual portions and it's fried.
04:00So it stands up almost like a spider or kraken kind of like.
04:04We crispy fry it by essentially being the crispy kind of base of that chaat.
04:09And then around it is where we start going crazy with all our sauces
04:12and all of our different accoutrements to make it that street food style chaat,
04:16but using such a beautiful ingredient like a soft-shell crab.
04:23This is a very small team. They're a really great team.
04:26And we're not only just doing coach-out service in here, you know.
04:29We have the bar Lilac Tiger that's up front.
04:32Lilac Tiger is our Southeast Asian street food bar up front.
04:35Really a la carte street food, dark, Indian whiskeys, Indian rums, Korean soju,
04:41mixed with all the beautiful street food from Southeast Asia.
04:45In the back, we have a 142-year-old coach house, hence the name coach house.
04:49This is the next dish that we're going to be doing. It's called gucci musallam.
04:52Gucci is the indigenous word for morel mushroom, but in Kashmir.
04:57So we do this dish once a year.
04:59The reason for that is we can get these beautiful morels from the Himalayans.
05:02This is the king of the mushroom, if you will. It's very, very expensive.
05:05There's always truffles stuffed inside them or foie gras or anything probably more expensive
05:10than the morel gets stuffed inside.
05:12So we are going to toast some garlic in here.
05:16And then we are going to add the beautiful cashews.
05:20Cashews have been used in South Asia to thicken sauces for a very long time.
05:26But I always joke that the whole world, or this part of the world,
05:30was still living in the butter chicken world.
05:32So butter chicken is the first introductory kind of dish for a lot of people
05:37when it comes to Indian food.
05:39But it's our job now to kind of expand what people understand as Indian food.
05:43So the cashews are cooked out, the garlic is cooked out.
05:46Now we're going to blend it with a little bit of milk.
05:51Just pure, velvety sauce.
05:56So the last component of this musallam is this beautiful saffron.
06:00This is saffron from Kashmir, where this dish is from.
06:04Kashmir is one of the few places in the world that actually cultivates saffron.
06:09And for those that don't know, saffron is literally the pollen of this beautiful flower.
06:13It's called a crotis, so it's basically kind of the family of a lilac.
06:17So it's purple in petals.
06:19And then the pollen is what they basically pick by hand.
06:23There's no machine on earth that can really do this.
06:26So that's why saffron is so f***ing expensive.
06:28So we're going to mix this in.
06:30And as that saffron sits, it's going to continue to infuse this broth.
06:33So this will go on top of the braised morels and the toasted brioche for the gucci musallam.
06:39The third course is called gucci musallam.
06:41We do it as almost like a toast.
06:43So we toast brioche, we layer it with fresh paneer that we made in-house.
06:47And then we braise those beautiful Himalayan morels.
06:50And then top it off with our musallam sauce that we blend into a mornay-type texture.
06:58This is Chef Rishi.
06:59He's been working with me on a really awesome, exciting project coming up called Mira.
07:03And we're going to be R&Ding and testing out some of these dishes on our menu tonight.
07:08I'm from the northern Indian-ish part of Gujarat, but born and raised in Singapore.
07:12So there's a lot of South Indian culture I grew up with.
07:15Vibing with Zubair has always been very natural.
07:18So what we have over here is all the mise-en-place laid out for one of the dishes we are R&Ding and serving tonight.
07:23It is inspired by a South Indian-style fish curry known as Meen Moli.
07:27So we're going to do a tuna crudo, and we're going to make this, for lack of a better word, a curry.
07:32First course for this evening is Meen Moli.
07:34Moli is a very hot dish in South India.
07:37A seafood dish, coconut milk, chilli powder, poppy seed, black mustard seed, coriander.
07:43We're sweating on the ginger garlic serrano.
07:45That curry leaf, that's the fragrance to me.
07:48Like when Zubair talks about how you cook with your nose, he likes doing that a lot.
07:52So what's fun about his recipes is he does that, and then I'm on the end, I'm nervous.
07:57So I'm writing things down, exactly how it should be.
08:01So that when we create binders for restaurants, the nerdy part of me comes out of that.
08:06He's definitely the more organized, the, you know, grammed out one.
08:09In the kitchen, I am.
08:10Yeah, you know.
08:11I'm the grandma just being like, pick it up with your hand and measure it with your fist.
08:16So the first step of the Meen Moli is essentially building that beautiful sauce.
08:20What we want to do next is blend it, and then we chill it until service.
08:24After that, we're going to go right into slicing this beautiful tuna.
08:28So we've got some yellowfin tuna that came in today.
08:32About a five-pound loin skin on.
08:34I'm going to start portioning them out for tonight's dinner.
08:36I'm going to just stack them up right now according to our portion size that we need.
08:40We're going straight into service.
08:41The fish is now being touched 20 different times.
08:45You know, it's a beautiful piece of fish.
08:46It's nice and fatty.
08:47Everyone loves this, so give the people what they want.
08:50When you cook food, it's got to satisfy the gut.
08:53You know, it's not about satisfying your ego, making a cool dish or a cool technique.
08:57Yeah, it's flavor first.
09:03All right, so this is one of the books that we found this in for the duck Numidian dish.
09:08So some poor soul back in the day, a thousand years ago, was saving some of these pieces of paper.
09:13They stashed it, and then an historian found it and started to translate them.
09:18And when they translated them, they realized that these were food recipes.
09:21It's a little snapshot into history.
09:23This is going to be the base, so it's verbatim from the book.
09:26This component is the 927-year-old component of the whole dish that kind of brings it all together.
09:32We're going to be doing dates, cumin seed, coriander seed, pine nuts.
09:38I think the best part, this dish really kind of even captures what we do here best.
09:43It's like, you know, sometimes people look at spices, and it's wild, and there's so many spices going on.
09:47But if you look at our dishes, the components really are very, very four or five components.
09:53But each component, the spice mix might be a 20-spice spice mix.
09:56But when it comes to plating, we like to really keep it simple.
09:59And again, going back to having the flavors come out first is always the goal for us.
10:04We're going to finish this duck sauce with vinegar and then a dash of fish sauce.
10:10So basically, for this sauce, you don't want to obliterate all of the beautiful components into just a puree.
10:16And it says a coarse grind on the spices, you know,
10:19In every bite, you'll kind of get that pop of the beautiful coriander, pop of the pine nut, pop of the cumin.
10:25And then the acidity with the seasoned vinegar and kind of the umami flavor of the rounding out everything.
10:31And these are majdoul dates, so these have a pretty great sweet quality to them.
10:35And they kind of balance that duck, the savory duck, the savory red rice khichdi with that beautiful jus.
10:42So when you take a look at this sauce, it really tells you how long we've been communicating across the world as humans.
10:49Yeah.
10:52So this is the tomatillo achar, sesame and tomatillo achar for our mahi-mahi taco.
10:57We love doing a taco every single menu.
10:59We make our fresh roti that we'll be doing as well soon.
11:02But this achar is basically the salsa of the dish, essentially.
11:05The fourth course is our quote-unquote taco.
11:08So instead of a tortilla here, we do a roti fresh in-house.
11:11So this is our fresh roti that we make every day.
11:13We make the rotis and then we punch them out almost like a street tortilla style size.
11:18And so this is going to be our tortilla, if you will, for our taco later on in the tasting menu.
11:23The joke in the kitchen is that once you get the perfect circles, you're ready for marriage, you know?
11:27So Jacob's what? Are you married already?
11:30No, I'm engaged.
11:31Yeah, there you go. We can tell.
11:34So we're building this as a taco in all the different kind of layers a taco should have.
11:38We decided to do almost like a som tam dressing.
11:41This is our version of a som tam.
11:44There's going to be some grandmas out there and be like, this is not the right way to do som tam.
11:47But it's as close as I can get to it.
11:50This is going to be kind of like our fresh salad that we like to put on it.
11:55So we have red Thai chilies, a little peanut powder, some ginger, palm sugar, limes, of course, some salt.
12:04And we're going to have our fish sauce as well that we're going to kind of add.
12:09This is the mahi that we just filleted.
12:11We slice this piece exactly the same size as what's going to fit in our roti later on for that taco.
12:16Mahi mahi is also a very popular fish in South India.
12:19We're in the Indian Ocean, so where I'm from in Chennai, it is very seafood heavy.
12:24What I'm building now is going to be our marinade for this beautiful mahi mahi.
12:28And it's yogurt, a little bit of oil, and then we make a blend of spices.
12:34There's more to Indian food than just heavy kind of dairy full North Indian dishes.
12:39The preconceived idea of Indian food now is that North Indian food is Indian food.
12:44And we're seeing a change in that with the beautiful restaurants in New York.
12:48Seema, Tamaka, and all those guys, Unapologetic, are doing an amazing job of exploring
12:53and kind of giving a little bit more insight into different regionality, and that's what we're doing here.
12:59It becomes this beautiful paste, right? And it's really going to hold on to that fish.
13:03To finish this base, it's a long list. Cumin seed, coriander seed, cardamom, black mustard seed, poppy seed.
13:10Something that we make 22 quarts of all the time just because we use it so much.
13:14And so we will drop this fish in. We want to really kind of let it marinate until service.
13:20We'll cook it fresh to order.
13:23Tuesday night, full dining room.
13:26Yeah, we're doing pieces of the Meera menu with Rishi and pieces of Kochao's for tonight.
13:34Hi guys, how are you doing? Thanks so much for joining us on a very special night.
13:39When you're a guest in our Kochao's, you're with us.
13:42It's about telling our story, but it's about also getting rid of that boundary as like, you know,
13:48you're a customer and I'm a chef, or you're really our experience.
13:52What we want our guests to experience is being guests in our house.
13:55So for me, I'm very blessed that we are a small place now.
13:59There's no big bank accounts back here.
14:01This is basically built from scratch and somebody's apartment was the first dinner.
14:05And where it is now, and with the James Beard nominations, we count our blessings every single day.
14:12All right guys, so the duck has been in for about six hours.
14:15That looks great.
14:17You always want to lightly cook this just so it absorbs everything from this beautiful sachet that we put in.
14:23You can smell all of the spices that went into it.
14:26When it's off the bone like that, that means that it's going to melt in your mouth.
14:31We're going to start essentially pulling all the meat.
14:33Our chef Jacob is going to roll it into a roulade.
14:36All right, so I'm basically packing it up really, really tightly.
14:40And what's nice about duck is that it's got so much collagen, interconnected tissue, fat,
14:46that you don't need any meat glue to hold it together.
14:49I just fold it over, push it in, pinch the sides.
14:54I poke some holes in my cake tester.
14:57The holes are basically to release the air so you don't create those air bubbles inside.
15:01And then we have a nice, tighter roulade.
15:05And you kind of just roll them back and forth.
15:09When this dish hits the floor, we stop all the music and we tell the whole dining room about the history of it.
15:14It's one of the most special dishes that we've ever done.
15:16It's the dish that really leads when it comes to the coach house.
15:20We're going to pass around the book here shortly, where we found this beautiful recipe.
15:24So history is a big part of what we do here.
15:26And we take a duck leg, we pull it, roll it into a roulade for you.
15:32Start digging in. This is called Duck Numidian.
15:34This is the last savory course.
15:36The reason for it is that this dish is very, very special to us.
15:38We're a very small restaurant in Chicago, and food doesn't mean just giving you a plate of food and letting you go on your way.
15:44For us, food is context, food is history.
15:47And in a world that needs to be reminded of its humanity every day, food is where it starts first.