A recent banquet that was hosted by Major SSH Rehman, Director, ITC Ltd., showcased the best of regional Indian food. Amidst the haleems and qaliyas, there was a curiosity counter. Its contents? Desserts made respectively from eggs, dal, lamb and chicken. Unusual? Most avowedly so. But was it good to taste? Yes, certainly, because the…
Enter any bookshop and you’ll invariably find that the most attractive section is the one on recipe books. Most cooks – amateur and professional – have an array of well-thumbed recipe books, which range from the strictly functional sort, with not a single illustration or photograph in it, to the glossy page variety, with one…
I’ve asked this question to several people, and by the end of it, I’m even more confused than when I started out. Marut Sikka, food impresario says with great conviction that pulao is made when rice and meat or vegetables are cooked in liquid so that the starch of the rice is absorbed. Biryani, according…
When Chef Noel Nalin Fonseka arrived in Delhi to do a trade test as the Corporate Pastry Chef at ITC Hotels, his interlocutors promised to get him the exotic ingredients he asked for “within two days.” He however, had no plans of working with exotic ingredients. He wanted to work with local fruit and come…
On a recent trip to Singapore, I made my way to the Mecca of Hainanese Chicken Rice: Purvis Street. Right by the uber fashionable Bugis Junction, no more striking contrast can be found. Purvis Street has started the inexorable change towards modernization, but when I first visited Singapore in 2002, it was an old-fashioned double…
“I am a failed trekking caterer”, Rohit Aggarwal of Lite Bite Foods tells me, with a woebegone look on his face. I assume he is joking, and guffaw appreciatively. After all, he and Lite Bite partner Amit Burman are among the three largest players in the restaurant industry currently in India, with no private equity…