What Is Bhuna: The South Asian Caramelization Technique

By Anikah Shaokat

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You may have noticed dishes called bhuna chicken or bhuna lamb while browsing through the menu of a South Asian restaurant. Unlike chicken makhani (butter chicken) or vindaloo (which generally involves vinegar), the names of these dishes don't refer to the ingredients involved but instead to a special technique used to make them. Bhuna is a cooking process common in Pakistan, Bangladesh, as well as Punjab, Uttar Pradesh, and Bihar regions of India, and it's characterized by a thick, flavorful sauce formed through a constant cycle of caramelization and deglazing.

Both a Hindi and Bengali term, bhuna loosely translates to roasting or frying. The process begins by "frying the onion, ginger, and garlic masala base in some fat, with constant stirring, until the moisture evaporates completely," explains Sanhita Dasgupta Sensarma, who runs Gusto by Sanhita, a Bangalore-based pop-up. This process causes the fat to separate from the solids and float to the surface. At this stage, ground spices and aromatics are added and cooked thoroughly to release their flavors into the fat. The key is to add as little moisture as possible, especially at the beginning stages of the process, which helps intensify the flavors of the masala that forms the base of the dish.

"The technique here is to fry without burning," says Dasgupta Sensarma, and the constant stirring helps the masala fry evenly, which concentrates both its flavor and color. Traditionally, mustard oil and ghee are the preferred fats for bhuna cooking because their high smoke points cushion any chances of burning. Spices like turmeric, coriander, and cumin will make the fried masala look dark yellow, while the addition of red chile powder turns it a lovely burnt orange color. Once the masala base darkens, seared protein is added to the pan with a little water to deglaze, if necessary, and the caramelization process begins all over again. The stirring and scraping resumes, this time to coax the juices out of the protein for another round of deglazing.

Stirring and scraping with minimal liquid gives this lamb haleem tons of flavor.

How many times is this process of adding and cooking off small amounts of moisture repeated? Well, it really depends on what you’re cooking. Tougher meats require a little more elbow grease. In lamb haleem, for example, you go through the process several times to extract the crucial collagen and juices that soften the grains and legumes into a rich, velvety texture. Fish and seafood, which tend to be more delicate, are often pan-seared to near doneness, then finished in a thick bhuna sauce.

Bangladeshi wedding chicken, a dish rich in both history and flavor, gets its distinctive warm notes and brilliant color through the bhuna cooking process. The masala is rendered a bright reddish-orange color with the help of Kashmiri red chile powder before the chicken is added to the pan. Unlike lamb, it only requires a few cycles through the bhuna process until the meat becomes fork-tender, bathed in a luscious and aromatic gravy.

A dry dish called kala bhuna, made with lamb, goat, or beef, from my home city Chittagong, is cooked this way from start to finish with minimal breaks from stirring and scraping. "Kala," meaning "black," refers to the distinctive dark brown, almost black color the dish gets from the repeated caramelization, deglazed only with the moisture released from the meat. You continue to brown, scrape, and cook the protein until it's completely dry but disintegrates to the touch, and the flavors are intensely meaty and brimming with the essence of cloves, nutmeg, cumin, and mace.

South Asians also use this method to prepare dishes from beyond their own culinary canon. In my home, spaghetti bolognese took the form of keema spaghetti in which the ground lamb or chicken was bhuna-cooked while the tomato sauce was added sporadically to deglaze the pan. The constant stirring made the sauce smoother than traditional Italian bolognese with each granule of meat imbued with cumin, coriander, and chile powder. As sacrilegious as it may be, I cook classic bolognese this way too. It makes the sauce more potent and silky (in a much shorter time!) so it coats every strand of pasta perfectly, just the way I like it.