(CNN) – The term “Indian cuisine” covers a lot of ground. From the peaks of the Himalayas in the northern state of Uttarakhand, to the southwestern tropical coast of Kerala, each landscape has its own climate, history, trade ties, and religious customs. And everyone has a unique food culture.
While curry houses with standard menus remain popular, the world’s taste for Indian gastronomic cuisine is evolving to include lesser-known regional delicacies and more daring experimentation.
Indian chefs living all over the world feed this growing movement, with menus celebrating their family heritage, while adding new dimensions to traditional cooking techniques and recipes.
CNN spoke with five of these culinary ambassadors about the dishes that, for them, capture India’s delicious diversity.
Chef Jessi Singh: Buffalo milk kebab, Punjab
Chef Jessi Singh was born in Punjab, India, and grew up between Australia and America. Take your unique culinary journey into modern Indian cuisine, including its buffalo milk kebabs.
When it comes to making a kebab, milk curd is probably not the first ingredient that comes to mind. But for Punjab-born chef and restaurateur Jessi Singh, this is the ultimate taste of home.
Crispy on the outside, with a soft, creamy center, kebabs made with cottage cheese, yogurt or paneer cheese are a popular appetizer in North Indian restaurants.
Born in an agricultural village outside Chandigarh, the capital of the Punjab, Singh came across the dish and its key ingredients in origin.
“Before he turned ten, he knew how to milk buffalo,” he says.
Singh is in charge of fermenting kebab milk in his Australian restaurants, including the Daughter in Law in Melbourne and Don’t Tell Aunty in Sydney. Served with an orchid and a bright pink beet sauce, its kebabs may not look like the meals I ate when I was little, but the bright colors represent Singh’s Punjab heritage in other ways.
“Back home, color is not associated with any genre, or with a particular people, or with a class,” he says. “Color belongs to everyone. You’ll see men wearing pink turbans, a red shirt … We’re a very, very colorful culture. So that’s what I put on the food.”
Chef Garima Arora: Millet roti, Telangana
Garima Arora is the first and only female Indian chef to win a Michelin star for her restaurant in Bangkok, Thailand. He now turns his attention back to India, starting with Telangana, the southern state of India where he was born.
Not satisfied with her own acknowledgments, Arora is taking another approach to “rewriting this narrative around Indian cuisine.”
“There was a big difference between the way urban Telangana eats from rural Telangana to tribal Telangana,” says Arora. “The idea was to take it and show it to the world.”
Arora gives millet a good refreshment as a roti tart, stuffed with chilled creamy cream and fresh coconut. She says her “cold curry” gives the “feeling of eating something fresh, fresh, earthy, but in a bite.”
Cap Deepanker Khosla: Mutton Biryani, Uttar Pradesh
Biryani is one of the most popular Indian dishes of all time. Chef Deepanker Khosla adds a new chapter in the history of biryani layers to his zero waste restaurant in Thailand.
“My father has this beautiful vegetable garden,” says Khosla, “So we harvest our own produce, fresh and sustainable food … that’s tradition.”
A hydroponic system on the restaurant’s terrace recycles rainwater to grow tilapia plants and fish, while all kitchen waste is recycled back into fish and compost food.
The restaurant’s farm supplies almost every product from Khosla’s “neo-Indian” menu, a modern, high-end cuisine that serves centuries-old Indian dishes.
It paved the way for the cuisine of almost every region, each with its own flavor and techniques.
Khosla makes a version known as Awadhi biryani, a beloved dish at home in Uttar Pradesh.
The lightly seasoned pieces of mutton and rice are placed in a pot, closed with dough and steamed slowly for hours, in the “dum pukht” style.
“Dum pukht means slow breathing, so let the food breathe with its own juices,” Khosla says.
With a constantly evolving menu that adapts to seasonal produce that can be grown on the farm, Khosla is delighted to highlight authentic regional recipes.
What we know about Indian cuisine “isn’t even the tip of the iceberg,” he says. “India has 22 different cuisines with over 5,000 different dishes … that’s what I’m proud of.”
Chef Palash Mitra: fish curry, West Bengal
Chef Palash Mitra dominates several South Asian meals at his Hong Kong restaurants. But for the West Bengal-born chef, one dish is closer to the heart: Bengali fish curry.
Fish is a staple of West Bengal cuisine, largely due to geography. Crossed by rivers flowing into the Bay of Bengal, East India has a wide variety of fish. And the importance of fish also leads to ritual life.
“Whether it’s a funeral or a wedding, fish is an integral part of it,” says Palash Mitra, a chef born in the capital of West Bengal, Calcutta. “The fish is the symbol of a new life, the end of life. It intertwines.”
As the culinary director of South Asian cuisine for Hong Kong’s Black Sheep restaurant group, Palash oversees four restaurants that offer fish dishes spanning the Indian subcontinent.
“Tandoori cobia … or salmon … are really popular dishes,” he says.
But Bengali fish curry is the dish “very close to my heart,” he says. Mitra cooks his mother’s recipe: pieces of rui, a South Asian carp, simmered over low heat in a light broth, enriched with spices, potatoes, cauliflower and tomatoes, and served with rice. He plans to put it on the menu of his restaurant, Rajasthan Rifles, at Hong Kong’s Victoria Peak this summer.
Chef Kuldeep Negi: Gambos Tandoori, Delhi
Spices are the center of all Indian cuisine and chef Kuldeep Negi understands them better than most. At his Singapore restaurant, Negi serves some of his heritage in Delhi with a kick.
As a child, Negi’s mother took him to the market and taught him how to select and mix spices.
“She is very particular when it comes to choosing species because India is a country of different seasons. So every season has different species,” says Negi. “How to use them, when to add them to the dish, how long you will cook them (this is very important).”
The art of mixing spices continues to be an important part of Negi’s cuisine today. While you’re more likely to find grilled chicken or lamb in the coastless Delhi tandoors, Negi wants to make the most of the seafood available in Southeast Asia.
For its signature dish, prawns tandoori, highlights the succulent and smoky flavors of jumbo prawns with its unique blend of spices: saffron, turmeric and red chili powder, mixed with rose petal, bleached cardamom and green cardamom.
“When you go to bite this, you’ll feel it, the freshness of the dust,” he says. “It’s about the species.”