Jyoti Natural Foods

In a quest to do more easy eating at home, I started experimenting with some pantry friendly prepared foods.  Nothing that required refrigeration or a freezer, just things I could stash and pull out when I needed some inspiration.  

Since I love indian cuisine, this seemed like a more interesting place to start than say, soups, beans, or pasta and sauce, which I'll admit are what first came to mind.

I researched all sorts of options, ranging from frozen dishes, to full meals that somehow require no refrigeration, to starter curry sauces and pastes.  Most of the frozen ones, while obviously the easiest, were pretty nasty (besides those from Trader Joe's, they really are shockingly good, some are even spicy!).  The shelf stable bagged pouches, besides looking a bit scary, mostly featured lentils or beans, so not my thing.  The sauces, chutneys, and pastes can be good, but require some extra work. 

And then, a friend recommended Jyoti products to me.  Jyoti makes several product lines, including fully cooked beans, rice, simmer sauces, and, the products I was most interested in: Heat and Serve cans.  

"We chose ‘shelf stable foods in cans’ to present the exotic foods of India to the customers through specialty foods shops and supermarkets. "

These items fall somewhere in between a full dish and a starter sauce.  You can mostly use them as is, heated and dumped over some rice or with some naan if you are lazy.  Or, you can spruce them up, and the packaging contains suggestions on many directions you can take the dishes.  The idea really is very accessible indian cuisine.

The offerings are all vegetarian, and your basic dal, channa, sambar, and saag are of course available, along with matar paneer and even jaipur karhi, potato dumplings.  The idea of canned paneer definitely weirded me out, but, hey, I wanted easy, right?

The products clearly aren't restaurant quality food, but overall, I was fairly impressed.  For a canned good, they certainly beat Chef Boyardee :)  You can find them at Whole Foods, on Amazon, etc.

Jaipur Karhi: Organic Potato Dumplings in Spicy Buttermilk Sauce.

"Add some water, heat and serve as a soup, or serve on top of rice or pasta as a sauce with potato dumplings instead of meatballs. Rice and Karhi is a popular Sunday lunch in northern India."

The first item I tried was the fascinating sounding potato dumplings.

I actually quite liked this. 

The sauce was a little strange at first, but the flavor grew on me.  Decently complex.  Creamy.  The potato “dumplings” were basically just potatoes, although a bit mushy, like mashed potato balls. Not bad exactly, just not quite what I expected. 

The entire thing however was just better than expected.  I would eat it again. I had it over rice, with some mango chutney and cilantro chutney mixed in. They also recommend mixing it with water to form a soup, or adding tomato, or adding other veggies. I could see any of those things working pretty well.

***+.  

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Delhi Saag: Spinach and Mustard Greens.

"Delhi Saag is a greens dish served as a vegetable side dish, as a cooking sauce, soup base or on pasta. The natural taste of spinach and mustard greens is enhanced with ginger, hot peppers, and lemon juice. No spices are added."

Next up, the saag.

This was interesting. I wasn't sure what to expect from canned greens. They were better than I expected, not too mushy, and fairly flavorful. But the flavor was just the greens themselves, there wasn't much else going on in the spicing. You definitely needed to add seasonings to it.

On my first try, I added roasted mushrooms, which worked well, some leftover gnocchi (random, I know, but I had gnocchi, and I thought it was kinda like potatoes, and potatoes and saag go together ...), some red pepper flakes to give it some heat, and a few scoops of cottage cheese (ok, more random, but it needed a creaminess and it was the best I could do given the contents of my fridge).  It wasn't bad exactly, but it wasn't quite good. 

On my second try, I again added roasted mushrooms, but also added cauliflower, potatoes, and peas, and left out the gnocchi.  Every one of these veggies worked really well with the saag.  I also added curry powder, onion powder, coconut flakes, and red pepper flakes to kick up the spices.  And I decided to go with the cottage cheese again, but added it at the last minute, so it didn't melt in as much.  I served it over some leftover farro.  I'm sure this is not how it was intended to be served, but I really enjoyed it, and would make this again in a heartbeat!

***+.

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Matar Paneer: Peas & Paneer Cheese. 

"Jyoti Matar-Paneer is a vegetable dish made with sweet green peas and Indian paneer cheese in a tomato, onion sauce."

After the success of the others, I took a plunge and went for the canned paneer, in the form of matar paneer.

Ok, this one I really, really did not like. 

The peas were mushy.  The entire thing was strangely sweet.  The paneer was actually decent, flavorful and a good texture. But ugh, I couldn't get past the overall flavor. Would not eat again.

**.