Pouches are for mail carriers. Pouches are for diplomats, babies and chewing tobacco. Pouches are for kangaroos. But lately, I’ve taken to pouches for bhindi masala, Punjabi chhole, and palak paneer.
I pouched at home several times with my wife and kids. I pouched in a Winter Park townhouse a few weeks ago, broadcasting pouchy goodness beyond my family to friends from Nebraska. I pouched a week later during a Saturday night at the house, with another family. I pouched in a Grand Lake cabin on my younger daughter’s fourth birthday.
Wherever my wife and I have lived – from Minneapolis to Albuquerque to Baltimore, with points between – we’ve always quickly found the East Indian markets, where we’d shop for spices, basmati rice, chutneys and fresh curry leaves.
Recently, in Indian grocery stores in Aurora and Broomfield, we began noticing entire aisles devoted to precooked Indian food packaged in pouches. Then we saw them in Whole Foods and Wild Oats markets. Then Super Target.
Every cuisine seems to have its convenience-food staples: microwaved burritos, ramen noodles, frozen pizza.
The East Indians clearly have embraced the pouch.
For my money-and these pouches are inexpensive, running between $1.50 and $2.50 each, often combined with two-for-
one deals and with one brand attaching free CDs of East Indian music to the packages – East Indian pouch food beats the rest of the “instant” preparations.
In fact, it can best Indian restaurants.
Take the paneer tikka masala from Parampara Food Products, in Pune, India, which we bought at an Aurora market.
“I would like it if I got it in a restaurant,” said Paul Aertker, a writer who recently moved with his family to Denver from Madrid, Spain, as our wives and kids tore through a pouch buffet in our house.
His are not words I’ve ever heard spoken after someone scarfed down a microwaved beef-and-bean chimichanga.
The object of Aertker’s praise, a dense tomato sauce packed with cubes of a light Indian cheese called paneer, sparkled with spice and coated the tongue with an unctuous, savory goodness.
Its success, as with most of the East Indian pouch dishes we tried, may hinge at least in part on its simplicity.
The list of ingredients did not contain 46 different things, with only three of them recognizable to people who are not chemical engineers.
Here: Paneer (cottage cheese), tomato, onion, refined vegetable oil, cashews, ginger, garlic, coriander leaves, skim milk powder, red chile powder, salt, sugar, spices and condiments, turmeric.
Another dish spoke to Hanah
McMahon-Cole, 9, who arrived at a Winter Park townhouse after her family drove all day from New Mexico, where they had been vacationing.
Nobody in her family, or mine, was in a cooking frame of mind, but no matter: We came fully pouched.
“This is excellent,” said McMahon-
Cole as she plowed into a serving of gongura dal, described on the package as “a traditional Andhra dish containing a mixture of gongura leaves, red gram dal and spices with special taste and appeal.”
She could credit Ushodaya Enterprises Limited in Hyderabad, India, for her natural, preservative-free meal.
The bhindi masala, a spice-laced okra dish, startled all tasters with its pungency and its pile of okra, none of it slimy. The dal makhani-“a Punjabi lentil delicacy with butter, onions, tomatoes, ginger, garlic and spices,” according to the packaging – stung our tongues with chile heat, but in a good way. The palak paneer-an Indian-restaurant staple, consisting of spinach, paneer and spices-would not be out of place in an average Indian cafe.
Out of about 15 pouch dishes we sampled, few things disappointed, although none of them warranted standing ovations, either. They were good, the instant-food incarnation of takeout.
We tried several pouches containing rice, and none of them succeeded. The rice tended to be either soggy or crunchy.
Skip the few rice dishes. Instead, cook a batch of rice before you heat the pouches, which we did by inserting them in boiling water or pouring the contents into saucepans. Most of it also can be microwaved.
Aertker quickly seized upon the major failing of all of the pouch food he tried, something that easily can be fixed.
“It’s too puréed,” he said. “It’s baby food. You need chunks.”
Most of the dishes, he said, would shine with the addition of slices of chicken breast, shrimp or cubes of tofu.
He also felt the pouches leaned too heavily on the salt, a sentiment I second. He was right, too, about the chunks.
Next time we pouch – and there undoubtedly will be a session soon – we’ll cook something on the side for those chunks.
And there’s another place we’ll inhale a pouch feast: on a camping trip.
Freeze-dried beef stew? We’ll pass. Instead, bring on the pouch of undhiu, a melange of winter vegetables with baked chickpea flour fritters and greens, a dish that both of my daughters, Stella, 7, and Ruby, 4, devoured with abandon during a sampling at home.
“Can we get more of this daddy?” said Ruby.
“Can I have it in my lunch?” asked Stella.
“Of course,” I answered them. “They’re just pouches.”
Staff Writer Douglas Brown can be reached at 303-954-1395 or djbrown@denverpost.com.
