Side dishes/ Side dishes and accompaniments from around the world/

Side dishes are the accompaniments that we have with our main dishes. It can be anything from salads, stir-fries, gravies, curries, dips, fritters, and even pickles and jams. It can be meat-based or vegetable-based. Essentially these help us to consume our main courses easily.

In India, we have a huge variety of side dishes to go with breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Chutneys, which are dips usually made from ground onions, coconuts, tomatoes, cilantro, mint, etc are preferred for breakfasts and dinner.

Gravies, stews, curries, stir-fries, roasts are some of the side dishes for lunch. Basically, there are two types of side dishes when it comes to lunch, esp South Indian.

One is the broth or stew with a pourable consistency. It is poured over the rice mixed well and then eaten. Kuzhambu/Kootan, Rasam/Saaru, and gravies come under this category.

The other one is the side dish that is had as an accompaniment with the mixed-up rice or with variety rice. This can be dry as roasts/varuval, stirfries known as poriyal, ipperi, thoran, shaak, etc.

Or it can be semi-dry gravy-like as in Kootu, pachadi, etc. Apart from this, there are preserves like thokkus and pickles and fritters like pappadam.

Every household has its own pickle variety. Come Summer and the womenfolk get busy preparing sun-dried fritters. I am dealing with Indian food in a separate post ‘Familiarising Indian Food‘.

In our house, we always have the idli podi or gun powder which is made by dry roasting and grinding lentils with spices. It goes well with most of our breakfast items and comes in handy any day when you are not able to prepare side dishes.

Other than that the most preferred side dish is the sambar which is a stew-like dip that can be had at breakfast, lunch, and dinner. My recipes for these two coming up soon.

Around the world, you have a variety of dips, salsas, stews, preserves, fries, steaks, roasts, mashes, and a lot more. In most of the world, salads are also considered a side dish. I have a separate page for salads.

So here, I shall be posting all the different side dishes from India as well as from around the world, with recipes and step by step method of preparation. I shall also acquaint you with the main dishes with which they would taste best.

I am posting these recipes randomly. When a sufficient number of recipes are uploaded, I shall categorize them.

Let’s get started…