For those of you who are actually Indian or cook lots of Indian food, I’m probably about to describe heresy, so you will want to close your eyes for the duration of this text.

One of the things that I learned in the Indian cookbook I’ve been working with is chhonk, which is basically: heat some spices in ghee for a few seconds, dump them over a thing you made. Voilà, it is now Indian food!

Am I shamelessly doing this all the time now? Yes. It is one of those clean hacks that allows me to come off as a capable home cook while also doing things I already know, like roasted cauliflower (450º for 30m, get it nice & burned) or boiled potatoes (1” chunks for 25m) or lentils (obvious) or chicken (sheet pan thighs are my fave, 350º for 20m), and then I can focus on some other thing in the kitchen that needs more of my attention.

The challenge with chhonk is twofold: you need to nail your cook time & temp to the very second, and you (very tragically) can’t make it in bulk & fridge for later. Both of these stem from the same problem, which is that spices are fragile and will burn if you don’t treat them with the utmost respect. So you can’t really start to make it until after everything else is done. And it’s spices, so you probably need to measure everything. And one of those spices is usually asafetida, which is very useful and… a lot.

This is obviously extendable to any pairing of oil & spice, especially if that oil has a high smoke point. (Butter wouldn’t work well due to its high water content, though, so you must use ghee.) I could easily imagine a scenario where you open up some red pepper flakes or berbere spice and dump it over carrots. Potatoes will take just about anything, as will chicken or scrambled eggs. Further research is needed.