Chana masala was my gateway dish

Sometimes, one dish is all that it takes to totally change how you see food.

Thank you for reading Letters from Paris on the Genesee! If you have not already, please subscribe and this newsletter will appear in your inbox every Tuesday morning. You can also follow me on Twitter and Instagram for more piping hot content.

It sounds hyperbolic, but chana masala changed my life.

I know it sounds ridiculous, but it’s true. Chana masala opened my eyes to a world of possibilities that I never knew existed. It piqued my interest in cuisines that I had never tried, in ingredients that never interested me, and introduced me to a whole new way of cooking. Looking back on it, chana masala served as a gateway dish, and helped finally break down a lot of barriers I had built between myself and food.

"Masala Channa Dal" by prideandvegudice is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

If you have never tried it, chana masala is an Indian curry that features chickpeas stewed in a rich tomato sauce with tons of spices. The flavor is deep, smoky, and spicy, and is incredibly hearty despite being a dish that can be prepared fully vegan. It packs an unbelievable amount of flavor into each bite without taking all day to cook, and as long as you have the correct spices, this Food Lab recipe is fairly straightforward to make at home.

For years, my wife and I have made it a point to eat meatless dinners several times a week. Our motivation was primarily health, but also meat can be expensive. By knocking out a couple meatless dinners a week, we could shave a little off our grocery bill while also being good(ish) to our bodies. But the problem we found with many meatless recipes was that they would take a familiar dish that had meat and replace it with something else. Maybe it was good, but even if it was, you knew what you were missing and the whole experience would fall flat. Many Indian dishes are meatless, which is what originally attracted our interest. But rather than making a meal where I know I’m missing a piece of chicken or beef, these dishes never had them, so there was nothing to miss. Chana masala is made with chickpeas, and those little powerhouses will never leave you feeling unsatisfied.

The only problem, if you want to call it that, was that neither of us had ever tried Indian food, let alone cooked it. We needed to stock up at our local spice store before we could cook anything, though, because outside of salt, pepper, and cumin, we didn’t have any of the spices required to make chana masala. Coriander wasn’t totally foreign to me, but I had never cooked with it much, and I had never used turmeric or garam masala until this time. Add all these dry spices with the fresh garlic, ginger, and chiles, and the smells coming out of our kitchen while it was cooking were unlike anything I had ever experienced.

I had virtually no frame of reference for my first bite. I had never eaten Indian food growing up, and it had never occurred to me until probably five years ago that there were cuisines from other parts of the world that I could make at home. But once I started eating, I was totally enchanted. The intense flavors were so deep and powerful that I barely noticed that this dish was made from ingredients I was skeptical of even a few months before. But what’s more was that after one serving and some warm naan bread, I was stuffed. Like, had to lay down on the couch and do breathing exercises stuffed.

Never in my life did I ever think I could go into a food coma from a meal that didn’t contain meat. It was a revelation, and fundamentally changed how I look at vegetarian and vegan cooking. It was also affirming to know that our theory about trying to ape familiar dishes by replacing meat with vegetables was correct. If you don’t want to feel like your meatless dinner is missing something, you just have to make a meal where meat never belonged in the first place.

Chana masala opened my eyes to the rest of the world. I was immediately taken by the powerful, complex spices, so much so that I started searching out more Indian recipes. Naturally, I looked for more curries, but the more I looked, the more I discovered just how many different regional variations and specialties go under the umbrella of “Indian food,” so many as to nearly render the term meaningless. It helped me gain an appreciation for just how big the world is, and how I had barely begun to scratch the surface of the incredible variety of food that humans have created. It’s a humbling thing to think about, and it’s a feeling I have kept with me as I seek to try more food from different parts of the world. Maybe that sounds like a bit much to some people, but it’s the reason why passages like this from Nayantara Dutta’s recent piece in Eater stick with me:

I’ve also seen the effects of colonialism in how people explain my own culture back to me, with no awareness of the power dynamics. This happens a lot at restaurants. At an Indian restaurant in Manhattan, a white server felt compelled to explain kulcha to me; farther downtown at a tea house, my Pakistani friend and I received a lecture from a white woman who proudly told us how she was bringing Indian tea to the West. Although she was well educated, she didn’t acknowledge that we were South Asian ourselves and wasn’t humble or self-aware about claiming expertise of our culture in front of us.

Even if I’m by myself in my own kitchen, I think of myself as a guest when making dishes like chana masala. They are there to be enjoyed, but at no point can I claim any level of ownership over it. Chana masala helped open me up to the rest of the world, and for that it will always hold a special place in my heart.