This is a multi-blog series, looking at the various ethnic grocery stores in the Madison area. This week, we look at Indian grocery stores.

If you’re looking for a vegetarian-based meal, you should consider shopping at Indian grocery stores, which are stocked with vegetable-based items as well as spices and sauces to enhance your dishes. In Madison, we have places like Swagat Indian Grocery (which has a large video selection, too), Bombay Bazaar and Maharaja Grocery.

I was fortunate to have Sara Parthasarathy, founder of Fill My Recipe (which sells pre-measured Indian spices for various recipes) be my guide as we went shopping at India House (same owner as Minerva Indian Cuisine) near Woodman’s West.

Recommendations for conservative palates

In the frozen section, some safe bets are the chapatti (a flatbread similar to naan except unleavened), samosas (fried pastry often filled with potatoes), fried paneer (un-aged, non-melting cheese) and khaman (sort of like a cake but made with chickpeas). Based on Sara’s recommendation, I fried the paneer until golden brown, then I sauteed it further in tomato sauce. It’s not too dissimilar from fried cheese curds, although a bit more bland.

The samosas and khaman can be eaten as-is, but the chapatti is best served with something with a lot of flavor, like curry or some of the things I bought for the next section of this report.

Other items I purchased were gulab jamun (deep fried ball made of milk solids and soaked in syrup), mango juice, lychee juice and plantain chips.

Recommendations for more adventurous eaters

Curry isn’t always spicy hot. Case in point, the Butter Chicken sauce mix I got was fairly mild. Meanwhile, the jar of mango pickle had a lot of kick and is best eaten with something like chapatti.

I also walked away with a jar of mint chutney (a great dip for the samosas), a bag of frozen snake gourd (a mostly bland tropical vine that’s in the fruit family), malai kofta (vegetable dumplings), red jalebi (deep-fried flour soaked in syrup), curry chili powder and a bag of fried “ribbons,” as Sara called it (they’re slightly spicy chips).

Those ribbons make for a really good snack. I also absolutely adored the creamy sauce that bathed the malai kofta.