Independence Day 2023 | How Indian chefs abroad are adding 'tadka' to non-Indian palates

It's a sight to see a queue of non-Indians waiting patiently to get their dosas made at hotels abroad that serve Indian dishes. Dosas are a big hit in Dubai. (Photo: Deepal Tamang via Unsplash)

Let’s say you are going to be off on a trip to Japan or Brussels or Brazil or Washington DC or London or Abu Dhabi or even another Indian metropolitan city and you’re not going to be seeing home-cooked food in front of you for a while.

For business or for pleasure, cultural diversity may certainly be something every globe-trotter wants to experience while travelling. But there is also another kind of cultural diversity that is not so much outside us but inside us — one that not just Indians, but now most non-Indians, can hardly live without either.

And that is the diverse and infinite number of sensations that homely Indian food activates on our taste buds and the infinite number of abdominal yearnings and physiological withdrawal symptoms that it can induce if we don’t find it in our cup of tea every morning or in our meal at least once a day.

Sweet, spicy, salty, soothing, crunchy, spongy, satiating, or devilishly intoxicating — a thali of hot, fresh and well-cooked Indian food — or a cup of brew — has it all. The fact is that it can make or break your mood and it can make or break how well you sleep at night. And it is only the art of good cooking and the heart of a good chef that can bring to life such a platter of delight.

If recent observations of international hoteliers is anything to go by, it is the uncanny taste of Indian food that has created a dynamic shift in the way tourists across the globe now view India as we turn 77.

But there’s more to it, too: cooking Indian food requires a specialised skill and an expertise that is fast creating jobs for those who marvel at it.

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“There has been a huge change of perception about Indian food in the last 10 years,” says Ganesh Venkiteswaran, executive sous chef at Hilton’s Conrad Hotel in Dubai who routinely works on training staff and ensuring smooth operations in their multicultural kitchens. “Earlier, Americans and Britishers didn’t eat Indian food because they thought it was too ‘spicy’, and at times, we still come across a few guests who are sceptical about it,” says the Goa-trained chef from the Institute of Hotel Management, who moved from Mumbai to Dubai to start his career and also specialise in designing a range of innovative menus for Conrad’s international culinary landscape of French, Greek, Korean, Italian, Indian, as well as local Arabian cuisine geared at a global clientele.

Venkiteswaran and his co-chefs found that getting conversational with guests and adapting a particular Indian dish to their palate was what brought them back. “Slowly, Indian chefs have learnt to create recipes with lesser spice, without losing the original taste of the dish, and to allowing everyone to try it,” he says.

This is the globalising and cosmopolitan re-skilling in a localised food industry that has changed the way the Western world sees Indian food — and India. But today, because of this adaptive approach, Indian dishes have become the go-to items in every single meal according to Venkiteswaran, pointing out how even a meal like breakfast is now ruled by Indian food, a meal that was traditionally never seen as ‘Indian’ in itself.

“The best part is at the breakfast time,” says Venkiteswaran. “You can see a queue of non-Indians waiting patiently to get their dosas made. Dosas are a big hit in Dubai; everyone loves it,” he says, adding how pav bhaji, poha, and upma also closely follow suit as breakfast favourites.

But it’s also the classical Indian cup of steaming hot masala tea that hotels like Conrad serve at breakfast that now makes this first meal of the day so Indian. “Yes, we do serve the traditional Indian masala tea, because people find it very refreshing in the morning,” says Venkiteswaran.

Dependence and independence

Tea has a range of stimulants as well as nutrients in it, and most of us can’t wake up or start our day without it. Yet, making it in the right way needs patience, tact, and sincerity. The best Indian style tea is made with fresh milk on a fire lit by an LPG cylinder and stove, and “dip-tea” packets don’t match up to the nutritive value, taste, or stimulation of such an authentic cup of hot Indian masala tea fresh from a chulha. While many new-styled packaged sachets of tea-powder mixes in the market come close to providing the same taste and fragrance, most experienced cooks know that in order to make the right cup of tea, each element of this intoxicatingly refreshing hot drink — from the way you add milk to the sugar, to the way you immerse the tea leaves, and to the way you boil and blend it — makes all the difference to the way you bring out the essence of Indian masala tea.

A lazily put together dip-tea concoction, or an unblended brew of milk and sugar and garlic and tea leaves, one that has not been boiled or stirred well, can lead to as bad a mood that will ruin your day as a perfect cup will rejuvenate and refresh you and nourish you and energise your day.

Working women — or even working men — with a full-time job or a career can thus hardly be expected to single-handedly run an Indian kitchen that puts out full-course meals three times a day, and especially without a professional helping hand at bay. Cooking Indian food, after all, is a daily endeavour in project management, one that involves managing multiple utensils and tools, keeping them fixed, chasing grocery apps and vegetable vendors to source a variety of ingredients and spices, and making sure one doesn’t run out of them at the last minute. It needs discipline, cleanliness, organisation, and taste. During global recessions, the one job that doesn’t become extinct is usually that of cooks’.

A more Westernised mindset from yesteryears may still help you to survive cooking all on your own, particularly if your diet includes dishes that are baked — breads, pastas, milk-based American fast food items, or European salads tossed around casually in dry greens. But cooking the culturally-blended and spiced up dishes that are all part of an Indianised or even Asianised diet full of curries and gravies and dals and sabzis and a variety of grains that make for different kinds of chapatis, all sourced fresh out of farmlands to fuel your blood and bones with 1000 watts of power, then you need to invest a lot more labour and time into your kitchen and this requires production, time management, multitasking, and presence of mind.

So what does it take to make sure you get it right?

The Indian tadka

“Taste is a major factor abroad, especially if you are doing business for a restaurant,” says Manish Vyas, who co-runs a coffeehouse called Helena Coffee in Vietnam’s Ho Chi Minh City alongside the Gujarat Restaurant at the city’s Bui Vien street, a popular tourist hub teeming with international travellers, many of who are Jain or Buddhist-vegan.

In order to maintain a certain amount of consistency in the taste they provide to their target clients, Vyas always ensures that his chefs are experienced enough to distinguish between different variants of the spices that he exports from different producers and manufacturers. “Travellers come back after 45 days of touring around, and we have to make sure they get to experience the same taste each time they return,” says Vyas.

That’s what creates brand retention for businesses such as Vyas’s. But it’s not just the exported spices that create the right taste — like a perfect cup of Indian masala tea, it’s the particular way that these spices are blended into a brew that make all the difference. And for that, you need the right utensils and the right equipment. “The most important equipment in an Indian kitchen is a good clay tandoor — that is responsible for the way 65% of the food is made,” says Venkiteswaran, adding how the rest of the equipment is something one can compromise on if one has a set of decent deep freezers.

Method to means

But it’s also the cooking gas that adds to the taste. In most South East Asian and even North East Asian restaurants around Vietnam, Indonesia, and Japan, restaurants and guesthouses use the LPG (liquified petroleum gas) cylinder that we have here, back in India, to cook food. “Unlike Europe and the US, where they use induction stoves that are run on electricity, the cylinder here is available to us within minutes,” says Vyas. “In Europe and other Western countries, the LPG is avoided because electricity is cheaper, but we cook our food here on the gas,” says Vyas, noting how calling for any service in Vietnam is quick, cheap, and highly efficient.

From the way the tea is boiled to the way the tender crispness is achieved in a phulka has more often than not to do with whether it’s cooked on fire or on electricity. Thanks to that, other factors can well be surpassed in order to get by as well. “We do not get the idli cooker over here easily, for instance, but there is a momo cooker which works well for making idlis, too,” notes Vyas.

“On the other hand, the Indian vegetables we get here are amazing — they are fresh, and they are delicious — from the tomatoes, to the cucumbers, and from cabbages to cauliflowers, you name it,” says Vyas. Venkiteswaran would agree. “I don’t miss my hometown Mumbai while I’m here in Dubai — we get a whole range of spices, and most dry products are imported to Dubai as well. We even work with hydroponic farms and organic local farms to procure sustainable and locally-grown produce, which reduces carbon emission, and we make sure that food waste compost goes back to the farms,” he says.

The taste of the tea and the taste of a phulka or the taste of a tandoori bharta have thus to do as much with the spices and the tools that we source out as they have do with the way an experienced chef or cook blends it all in. But as national policies change around the globe with the expansion and growth of the food industry, there are now new challenges that have emerged in the training and retention of talent.

So, how do local staff members from other countries cope with an Indian kitchen? “It takes our local Vietnamese staff some time to understand things. But within three-four months, they start picking up and understanding what we want,” says Vyas. “Now, they know what is a chapati, they know what is a tandoori, they know what is a roti …and they know what is chai. They know gaanthia and they know faafda,” he grins.

Some decades ago, Indian cooks learned how to ‘Indianise’ a stack of bland, Chinese noodles, and Italian pastas and pizzas, or American hamburgers, with their homemade spices. Now, it’s also the other way round. As Indians like Vyas and Venkiteswaran take their food and culture to foreign lands, turning sous chefs and entrepreneurs by training and guiding locals to not just enjoy Indian cuisine but also make a career out of it, the Chinese and the Americans and the Italians and the Vietnamese will all also globalise our local cuisine by inflecting their own tastes and styles and habits into it.

Finally, that’s what the independence to 'survive' is all about — acquiring cultural inter-dependence.