How to Eat: Indian food

Описание: YouTube personality KayRay, whose name is Kiran Rai, and Aparita Bhandari walk us through how to eat Indian food from Bombay Street Food Company on Bay Street. For more on this topic visit the Toronto Star: http://on.thestar.com/2mIqQMx Or read an excerpt below:

Exploring Indian street food: How to eat

This is the first in a series in which Aparita Bhandari explores how to eat the diverse foods available in Toronto.

This is the first in a weekly series in which reporter Aparita Bhandari explores how to eat the different cuisines that make up Toronto’s diverse culinary landscape.

There’s a lot of foods I don’t know how to eat. But to kick off this series, I thought I’d start with one that I know well: Indian food. I moved to Toronto from India in 1998 and grew up eating Indian food, with my hands — the way it is meant to be eaten.

It’s a practice that gets a bad rap. Some see it as unsanitary. In 2012, when Oprah Winfrey visited India to dine with a family in Mumbai for an Oprah’s Next Chapter special, she said, “I heard some Indian people eat with their hands still.” That comment, and much of Winfrey’s visit to India, was criticized for presenting stereotypes and clichés.

Indian food, for the most part, is meant to be eaten with your hands. At home, I regularly abandon the use of spoons, knives and forks, especially when either my husband or I have forgotten to run the dishwasher. And I use my hands to eat everything from roti (Indian bread) and sabzi (vegetables) to daal (lentils) and rice. When I am at a restaurant, I’ll typically use a spoon to eat daal and rice, but any type of Indian bread is best eaten with your hands.

So when I went to meet Kiran Rai, an Indian actor, fellow food enthusiast and YouTube personality known as “Kayray” to share a meal, it was more to explore why we continue to use our hands to eat Indian food.

For more of this story visit thestar.com: http://on.thestar.com/2mIqQMx