Bhasin Balraj: Hi! I am Bhasin and this is my wife Nicky and together we are from the Bombay Curry Company in Alexandria. We also have the Delhi Club in Arlington, Virginia. We are showing you how to make cucumber raita.

For cucumber raita, we are going to need some cucumber, which we are going to grate. If the cucumbers have lots of seeds, you can scoop the seeds out before grating it. If you want you can peel the cucumber, or if you want you can go with a cucumber that s not peeled.

While, she likes it peeled, I do, so my raita is not peeled and hers is peeled. The yogurt as we explained earlier is blended with a little bit of milk to make it, to thin it down to the viscosity that we like. It s also been sweetened a little bit, just a little bit to counteract some of the tartness it had and we have added just a little bit of salt to it.

After the cucumber is done, it s grated we will squeeze out the access water. And mix it in with the yogurt and the salt. This is what is called a cucumber raita. A wonderful side dish, dipped, great with any Indian meal. This is a cucumber raita and if you like its all a matter of taste, you can add more spices, like I showed how to do it that in the earlier segment and you can do it whatever you like. Some of our customers at the restaurant, they ask us how to make the raita and we tell them and they come back to us and they say, hey you know, we tried and we did the same thing which you told us and it did not have the same taste. That s sometimes because the restaurants tend to make their own yogurt and it s a little different, a little more tart then the stored bought yogurts. So, my suggestion would be you make your own yogurt and you will have a cucumber raita just like in any good restaurant.

Now, I am going to show you how to make a very interesting raita, a very popular raita in India called a Boondi Raita, so popular that it needs its own segment.