There is a quiet, powerful shift happening in the professional kitchens of India today. If you walk into a cooking class at the Academy of Pastry & Culinary Arts (APCA), you won’t see students just memorizing the spice levels of a Rogan Josh. Instead, you’ll see them analyzing the ph level of fermented kanji or...
There is a specific kind of silence that falls over a professional kitchen when a perfect sfoglia, which is a sheet of handmade pasta, is being rolled out. It’s the sound of wood meeting flour, a rhythmic, tactile friction that has remained unchanged since the Renaissance. For a culinary student, this isn’t just about making...
Vinesh Gupta opened Layla in Delhi in 2017 as a Mediterranean restaurant. He spent the first few years explaining to his own guests what they were eating. Most people walked in thinking Mediterranean meant hummus, falafel, a shawarma wrap if they were feeling adventurous. “People associated Mediterranean food mostly with Lebanese and Turkish dishes,” he...
Take an example of Badshah at Crawford Market who has been selling falooda since 1905. The original ingredients are saffron milk, arrowroot vermicelli that goes translucent in the cold, sabja seeds swollen with water, a scoop of kulfi sitting on top going soft at the edges while you eat fast enough to keep it from...
Go to Kyani & Co on Jagannath Shankar Seth Road before 9 am on any weekday. Watch what happens. The mawa cake at Kyani & Co is gone by 10 am most days. Not because they ran out of ingredients. Because someone’s grandfather has been coming since before their father was born and he gets...
Does the smell of fermented yeast and roasted flour make you feel like you’re missing out on something? In Bangalore, that specific aroma doesn’t just belong to the old-school Iyengar bakeries anymore. These days, it’s drifting through the high-ceilinged glass studios of Indiranagar and past the rumble of Metro lines, where professional deck ovens are...
To understand Artisan Bread Recipes, you have to first stop thinking like a cook and start thinking like a biologist. In a commercial factory, bread is a dead product of mechanical speed. But in the world of the true artisan, bread is a living, breathing ecosystem. It is a slow-motion chemical interaction between wild microbes,...
There is a moment in every culinary arts training program when a student realises that Thai food is not a collection of recipes, but a philosophy of chaos managed by hand. It usually happens over a stone mortar and pestle. The room fills with the volatile oils of bruised lemongrass, the stinging aerosol of bird’s...
To truly understand Viennoiserie, you have to stop thinking like a baker and start thinking like a blacksmith. In a high-end kitchen, we don’t just “mix” dough; we temper it. We manipulate fat and gluten under strict thermal conditions to create a structural marvel that shouldn’t, by the laws of physics, stay upright. While a...
If you walk into a high-end patisserie, the display case looks like a battlefield of terminology. To the uninitiated, everything is just “cake” or “pie.” But for a pastry student, the distinction between a Tart and a Torte is foundational. It is the difference between shortcrust and sponge; between structural snap and rich, flourless decadence....
