Everybody likes a bit of exotic and in India, it comes by abundance. Or at least that’s how any non-Indian experience is described. Yet Australian chef Christine Manfield says her love for India had more to do with the spices. “I already had an innate love for spices and when I came here, the variety was what had me hooked. I knew of Indian food and so it wasn’t a discovery when I first came, but the regional differences are fascinating.”
Culinary geeks will instantly recignise Christine’s name, but for the rest, you may be wondering why the name and face ring a bell. Well, that’s probably because you either picked up one (or more) of her popularly known cookbooks or you’ve seen her dice more than just constructive criticism on Masterchef Australia.
The acclaimed chef however brings her speciality to the city of Nawabs as a part of the Oz Fest. Serving dinner to an invite-only guest list at Taj Falaknuma at the ‘Feast on Literature’ event, Christine will present her brand of culinary expertise in a five-course meal that she’s quite tight lipped about.
“I can’t tell you much about it. But I’m creating it to be an opulent seductive spread fit for the Nizams. I’ve used ingredients primarily from here (India) – organic chicken from the city, fish from Kerala. I’ve used food that looks like jewels, like pomegranates, nuts and so on. There will also be a selection of wine that has been picked to go with the menu.” With six months of thought process that went in to the making of the menu, we’re pretty sure that the spread will be quite something.
Christine Manfield is also popular for her restaurant in Sydney, called Universal. Telling us more about her kitchen there, she says, “The idea behind the name of the restaurant was to convey that it serves flavours of the world. You need to understand, I don’t serve traditional Indian, or Spanish or Italian or anything. What I do instead is take the flavours, make them my own, personalise and create something new with it.” Serving from an a-la carte menu of 35 dishes, guests can choose what they like which the chef then arranges into a tasting platter. “We don’t serve everything together and you can’t share. We organise the choices into sequence where flavours complement each other. The dishes on the menu are included to form pieces of a jigsaw puzzle.” To keep the experience pristine, Christine also changes the menu regularly. “I change the menu every five days. But quite a few dishes do get repeated eventually. Since the dish gets paired differently, there are a few changes to the flavour from time to time.”
Besides creating, and sometimes recreating dishes, Christine’s cookbook Tasting India is a different experience all together and gives the Indian gourmet quite an array of recipes to choose from. “The recipes in the book were collected from all over the place - given to me by chefs from across the country, people I met, the cook on the street.” So which was her favourite dish? “I like the curry leaf chicken and that is something I would like to try making differently. Besides that, whenever I cook for special guests, I usually make Hyderabad biryani.” However, the eggplant is her ultimate favourite.