The Fairmont Dubai gives regional amateurs

A cuisine with many influences About 450 years of Portuguese occupation made an indelible mark on this cuisine - and fusion dishes such as prawn balchao and pork vindaloo are not the only result. "Ingredients such as tamarind from Africa, potatoes and pineapples from Ecuador, tomatoes from Peru, peppers from Sri Lanka and cashew nuts from Brazil were brought over by Portuguese missionaries," De Souza says. Goan food today is a "fusion of cultures throughout the centuries", she says, with Arab, Brazilian, French, African, Malaysian, British and Indian (particularly Konkan) influences. It's all about the seafood Thanks to its coastal position, Goa is blessed with an abundance of seafood including kingfish, prawns, shrimps, lobster, crabs, mackerel and pomfret. De Souza warns that a Goan meal can be considered incomplete if fish, rice and curry cooked with coconut fail to make an appearance. Important ingredients As well as the ubiquitous coconut - freshly grated and in cream, milk and oil form - De Souza says that it is kokum (a blackish-red fruit with a salty-sour flavour) that "gives Goan cuisine its particular appeal". Jaggery, black cardamom, Xacuti masala powder, kanji rice and piri-piri are also widely used. If you want your dishes to taste absolutely authentic, you'll need to grind the spices on a stone and cook them in a clay pot over a fire, to impart a deliciously smoky flavour. Must-try dishes Goan fish curry. "It's a staple in the Goan diet. You prepare it as you would a normal Indian curry, but the spice mix is a bit different with the addition of coconut milk and kokum," says De Souza. (See the Bites blog for her recipe for Goan prawn curry.) Popular street food includes potato chops (potato patties stuffed with minced beef and shallow fried), ras omelette (a plain omelette dipped in spicy coconut-based gravy and garnished with lime and onions) and chamucus (Goan samosas, filled with chicken or beef). Another favourite is stuffed pomfret, which De Souza describes as "a combination of aromatic spices stuffed in pomfret, which is then shallow fried. "This makes the skin very crisp and easy to tear off and the inside very soft and moist".