Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

WASP who loves Indian food here, and have been trying for a while to learn how to cook Indian food from well-known cookbooks by the likes of Julie Sahni and Madhur Jaffrey. My wife recently got us an Instant Pot as well, so when Amazon popped this up on my list, I was intrigued. Then I saw how new the book was and how many of these five-star reviews claimed to have made a bunch of the recipes already, and I was convinced this was a review-farm operation. I still liked the idea of an an IP-specific Indian cookbook enough to do further research, saw that Dr. Pitre's following was a pre-existing thing earned through some hard work both on and off the Internets, and decided to give it a go after all. I thought I might have made a mistake when I saw the following couplet in the first proper chapter: "Do we really need all those spices and ingredients to cook Indian food? I say no." Thankfully, Dr. Pitre alleviated my fears by immediately going on to catalog the core spices of Indian cooking, addresses the importance of having a spice grinder and preferably making your own garam masala, and offers a couple of solid-looking recipes for common spice blends (which don't necessarily involve the IP). Listen to this advice re: getting into the nitty-gritty of the spices. It's advice I already took from Julie Sahni, and every time I attempt to make Indian food I am reminded that this effort is well worth it. Overall, I am impressed with this book. It's cleanly written, well-organized, and (as already mentioned) seems to share the basic values I've seen in other well-regarded writings about Indian cooking for a Western audience. It is an entirely different approach to Indian cooking than the "classics" I've been studying; I'm sure purists would scoff at some of the occasional shortcuts taken. But a lot of Sahni's recipes from _Classic Indian Cooking_-- great as they are!-- take multiple hours to make, and often require a trip to the Indian grocery to pick up something I don't have. My exploration of that particular cookbook has been relegated to the weekends accordingly. Meanwhile, we gave Dr. Pitre's butter chicken a go tonight (using Sahni's garam masala, roasted up from whole spices by yours truly). Aside from the garam masala (which we already had handy), we had basically everything in the recipe on our shelves or in our freezer. The makin' of took less than an hour from end to end, and we were both quite impressed with the results (although, to my surprise, my Tunisian-lineage wife requested I dial down the cayenne next time - I felt the amount of kick in the recipe was dead on, and certainly much more satisfying than what we'd find in our local Indian buffets). We're giving Dr. Pitre's IP baingan bharta recipe a go tomorrow. Since it's sometimes proven a bit fussy for us on the stovetop, I'm also not sure I believe that paneer can be made with consistent success in an Instant Pot. I'm sure we'll probably try it anyway. And even if you're not particularly into Indian food, some of the basic Instant Pot advice on offer is certainly worth having. This is a very welcome and well-thought-out approach to Indian cooking for weeknight cooks, and if we have results equal to that butter chicken with the next couple of efforts from the book, I'll happily come back and bring this up to five stars.