Home-Cooked Indian Food: The Best of Both Worlds

The best of both worlds, in Indian food, is a plate that tastes as good as the one you order out — and is still the kind of food an Indian family actually eats on a Tuesday. Restaurant Indian and home-cooked Indian are close cousins rather than the same cuisine. This is what separates them, and how to get the best parts of both on a weeknight.

What is the difference between restaurant Indian food and home-cooked Indian food?

The difference is the base. Almost every curry house in Britain builds from one standing gravy: a single master sauce made in bulk, then pushed in different directions at the pass with chilli, tomato, cream and sugar. It is a brilliant system for getting forty covers out in an hour. It is not how anybody cooks at home.

In a home kitchen the masala is built for the dish, in the pan, from the start — onion, tomato, ginger and garlic, bhuno'd until the oil separates. That one step is the reason a home dal and a restaurant dal do not taste alike.

Why does home-cooked Indian food taste different?

Four things, and none of them are secret.

• The masala is built from scratch every batch — onion, tomato, ginger and garlic, bhuno'd properly, not ladled out of a pre-made gravy base.
• There is a real tadka, done at the end, the way dal is finished at home: hot ghee, jeera, sometimes hing and a dried red chilli, poured straight over the top.
• Spices are ground and blended in our own kitchen, rather than one generic curry powder doing all the work in every dish on the menu.
• There is no cream-and-butter finish. We do not float ghee on the top for the photograph.

Is home-cooked Indian food less spicy?

Usually, yes — it is milder than a restaurant curry. Home cooking is spiced rather than hot. The flavour comes from the masala base, from haldi, jeera and dhania, and from how long the onions were given in the pan — not from chilli heat. That is the level a family actually cooks at, because the same pot has to feed a nine-year-old and a grandparent.

Mild is not the same as bland. A korma is mild because it is sweet. A home dal is mild because it never needed the chilli in the first place.

What actually goes into it?

The staples that live in an Indian kitchen: haldi, jeera, dhania, rai, hing, ajwain, methi and garam masala, alongside dal, atta, rice and ghee. It is an ingredient list you could read out to your mum.

Every dish carries its full ingredient list and allergen information on its product page. We cook in a single kitchen where wheat, dairy, mustard and sesame are all in use, so we cannot guarantee any dish is completely free from a given allergen — worth reading properly if anyone at your table has an allergy.

Which dishes give you both worlds at once?

The everyday repertoire is where the two actually meet: food comforting enough to feel like a treat, plain enough to eat every week.

• Dal tadka — the one dish that tells you everything about a kitchen.
• Rajma chawal — kidney beans and rice. Sunday lunch across most of Punjab.
• Chole — chickpeas cooked dark and tangy with amchur.
• Kadhi — yoghurt and gram flour, gently sour, and nothing like anything on a takeaway menu.
• Baingan bharta — aubergine cooked over flame until it collapses.
• Aloo gobi — potato and cauliflower, dry-ish, the dish most people's mothers make.

Vegetarian eaters get the better half of this menu, which is the honest position: most of the everyday Punjabi repertoire is vegetarian to begin with. Where we do cook meat, the meats cooked in our kitchen are halal.

How does it get to you?

Saakshi's Kitchen cooks regional Punjabi home food in our FSA 5-star kitchen, which holds a 5-star rating on the FSA food hygiene register. Meals are portioned individually, frozen, and delivered to your door.

It arrives frozen and belongs in the freezer until you want it. Cook or reheat straight from frozen, following the pack instructions, until piping hot. Don't refreeze once defrosted; if something has defrosted, eat it within 24 hours and reheat it once only.

We deliver across UK mainland. Some areas we can't reach, so check your postcode before you plan a week of dinners around it.

So which one should you order?

Both — they are for different nights. The curry house is for a Friday with friends and a table full of sharing dishes. Ghar ka khana is for the four nights in between, when nobody wants to cook and nobody wants another takeaway either. 79% of our orders come from families who order again, which is roughly what "everyday food" looks like once you put it in a spreadsheet.

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