Dum Pukht cuisine to come to Gourmet Abu Dhabi

Chef Imtiaz Quereshi, born into a family of legendary chefs to India’s Mughul Emporerers tracing back to over 200 years, will be serving up Dum Pukht cuisine at this year’s Gourmet Abu Dhabi.

Chef Qureshi will be guest chef at the five star Beach Rotana Abu Dhabi’s Indigo restaurant from 16-19 February. He will also host an intimate culinary demo and luncheon for 12 guests on 18 February where he will demonstrate several creative tandoor recipes in the Dum Pukht tradition.

“Dum Pukht is classed as a ‘heritage cuisine’ of India, and its origins are steeped in history,” explains chef Qureshi.

“Originally a rugged frontier cuisine of the nomadic tribes of the Great Himalayas, it was brought to the royal Mughal capital, which is current day Uttar Pradesh in the Ayadh region, in the 1800s in response to a famine which was ravaging the state. With enormous containers of rice, meat, vegetables and spices slowly and continuously cooking over charcoal to be available day and night to feed the masses, a new cuisine was born with astonishing results and the splendid aromas attracted royal attention.”

‘Dum’, meaning to ‘breathe in’, and ‘Pukht’, meaning ‘to cook’, was adapted and perfected into a fine dining cuisine for the royal table by the Qureshi family of chefs and was renowned as the most fashionable haute cuisine of the Indian aristocracy and nobility throughout the royal courts of Hyderabad, Delhi, Kashmir, Rampur, and Bhopal until falling into decline following India’s independence.

“Many of the chefs and recipes of the Dum Pukht cuisine were forgotten or lost,” continues Chef Qureshi, who has made it a personal mission over his 60 year career to initiate the revival of this historic cuisine. “While I was working as executive chef of the five-star Sheraton Hotels in India, I was encouraged to research the Qureshi family annals to rediscover this forgotten cuisine of the Mughal’s.”

Refining and evolving the Dum Pukht tradition for modern centuries, chef Qureshi re-introduced the world to the flavours and intensity of the slow cooking tandoor method with the opening of the Dum Pukht restaurant in New Delhi’s ITC Maurya Sheraton hotel in 1985.

Gourmet Abu Dhabi will run from February 5-20.