Author: Anand

Root to Shoot Revival

Radhika Khandelwal tells us how what’s almost been forgotten transformed her kitchen for the better.

“Don’t throw that, it’s food!” my naani (maternal grandmother) screamed. My seven-year-old self was perched on the bench in the huge open kitchen, helping my grandmother cut beautiful and bright red carrots—some perfect and some wonky—for pickling, and I was just about to bin the carrot tops. 

This incident occurred in 1995 and that one memory of sitting and slowly connecting with food and my grandmother on a winter afternoon makes me realize how much our food systems have changed. The memory highlights how well we used to eat and care for our food. The use of carrots in the winter meant we were eating seasonally; the process of pickling to savor the delicious juicy carrots in the summer meant we used to preserve our food, and the fact that my grandmother used to make the most delicious carrot leaf chutney with the carrot tops meant we were eating root to shoot. 

As I grew older and busier, with school and friends and life, no one had the time to sit down and cut carrots. Pickles would still come from my naani’s house, and we would relish them and talk about the slower life but do nothing about it. 

It was not until I went to Australia to pursue my dreams and I saw a picture of a wonky looking carrot on a billboard stating an insane amount of food being wasted for not looking perfect that the memory of my grandmother and her kitchen came rushing back to me. As I researched more and more, I realized the absurdity of the fact that we as a planet have more than enough food to feed everyone, yet approximately 800 million people face food insecurity while we waste one third of the food produced worldwide. 

From then on, I knew I wanted to be deeply involved with food waste as a challenge and play my role well as a chef who could influence better food choices. 

I opened my third restaurant in New Delhi with its cornerstone set as sustainability. And although I didn’t realize it at the time, I was taking away the values that would form the cornerstone of Fig & Maple’s philosophy. When I launched my restaurant in 2016, I was looking to grow as a chef and share my love of local and regional cuisine with New Delhi. Despite establishing a successful café in a quaint Delhi hamlet, I was hungry for change, and I wanted to spread my creative wings.

Eating locally and seasonally is about more than just shopping from the street-side vendor next door. In New Delhi, the concept of neighborhood bakeries and other small-scale food suppliers in urban areas doesn’t exist the way it does across the West. So, when we encourage our guests to source locally, what we’re really asking them to do is make the effort to go out of their way.

However, as a chef, I know better. I can control how I source the ingredients I use and how I promote them. And when such abundant biodiversity exists in the country I live in, it truly does eliminate the need for looking outside. While this shouldn’t feel revolutionary, it really is, because we’ve been able to participate in the revival of produce that was tucked away in family stories and culinary history.”

Imagine taking a trip to Goa and learning how to use ingredients like Triphal or Bimbli by the very farmers who grow them. Triphal is a delightfully deceptive berry that resembles a Timur pepper but tastes like lemon. Bimbli is a sour fruit which lends a background note for many local curries. It’s also consumed as a chaser right after an urrak shot. Urrak, which is the first distillate while making Feni from fermented cashew apple juice, is incidentally a local Goan drink that has been kept alive through oral tradition, to an extent that Feni today enjoys a ‘Geographical Indicator’ status, India’s equivalent to the French or Italian appellation system for its foods and beverages.

To discover these ingredients and use Fig & Maple’s kitchen as a showcase platform did more than align with the values I have wanted to abide by as a chef. It also became a great honor to be the conduit for sharing these stories. At every step, we have tried to remain cognizant of not appropriating these ingredients and stories as ours.

One of the values I have always wanted to propagate is the pride for regional Indian ingredients and cuisine, showcased through modernist techniques.

To walk around the kitchen at Fig & Maple is to become acquainted with familiar new-age equipment like blitzers and sous-vide machines and vacuum chambers. And to every onlooker’s delight, the modern equipment lives harmoniously alongside traditional Indian cookware like brass rods, the sil-batta, mortar-pestles, and the chakki for grinding small batches of flour.

By now I had a bank of local farmers I wanted to work with and learn from; I had a sound understanding of local, seasonal and indigenous produce, and hunger and curiosity to learn as much as I could. I understood that we need to highlight forgotten grains and greens alike before they are truly extinct, we needed to understand the biodiversity and the quick loss of it and we needed to understand food as food, not as waste. However, only a certain percentage of the urban consumer is “woke” enough to understand regenerative or sustainability in food. 

When you dine out at a chef-led space, you are being influenced by each dish brought to your table. Which means flavor is king. People go out to experience new and delicious foods. Unfortunately, the PR behind sustainability makes the general consumer feel like it’s going to be boring, tasteless, and banal. It was time to sharpen my knives and get innovative. 

When it came to cooking the food we cook, we consciously made sure we went out on a limb into territory that we were completely unfamiliar with. Whether it was the using or borrowing axone from the Northeast or a skyu from Ladakh, or even making our own Kachampuli vinegar because of its limited availability, no ingredient was too wild, too bold, or too strange to be used.

I too started with very, very small changes. Instead of using wheat, one of the four most used ingredients (60% of the world’s calories come from industrially grown wheat, rice, maize and potato), I started using ancient grains like amaranth, ragi, nachni and kodo millet to make the same scrumptious dishes. It was an easy-replacing, never-failing formula, with of course tweaks to the recipe. I realized quickly how easily my consumers adapted to this. They had moved to this change with great ease. It was time to make bigger changes. 

My signature salad at the restaurant never stays the same. From the greens to the fruit and the mustard dressing, everything changes with every passing season. We started marketing ourselves as a place with a consistently great experience but prided ourselves to be never consistent when it came to the taste of the dish. When we adapt to seasonality and locality, we can never, ever guarantee your food will taste the same; we just have to accept that. In the summer we use leaves such as amaranth, kolmi shaak, gongura—showcasing the vast biodiversity of India. And in the winter we go down the route of using nastrutium, mustard leaves, radish leaves. We dehydrate figs in the summer; we ask our farmers to send us as many varieties as they grow and we match the flavors with multiple kinds of mustards from across the country and emulsify it with stalks and roots of coriander (yes, those flavor bombs which too are usually binned). The Fig & Maple salad, based on the concept of the restaurant—showcasing biodiversity, seasonality, preservation and using hyper-local ingredients, named after the establishment, presented in the most beautiful crescent—became the bestseller. It made me question everything we had learnt so far about consistency. 

Now came the biggest challenge I had faced so far in kitchens worldwide—food waste—how to change people’s perception behind what’s food and what’s not. What we call “zero-waste” in light of a global megatrend is, in so many ways, our own heritage that we have somehow become far removed from over the course of a few generations. Lives are busier. Families are smaller. The cost of living is higher. And cooking at home is simply not a priority in the face of a lifelong multitasking trapeze act. For better or for worse, we have had to choose convenience, which has led to knowledge being lost or forgotten. 

It took me two years to train my team to understand the value of food. I was pretty much obsessed. I would go through the bins to make them understand what they are throwing out is food. I spoke to them about how they ate in their hometowns and each one had a different story of preservation and eating root to shoot. We started working together to create menus highlighting these culinary traditions and using very modern techniques to make them way more approachable to our consumer. Now, we proudly run a zero-waste kitchen and bar, with each borrowing skins, peels and preserves from the other. It was tough, but it’s possible. One of our best-selling bar snacks is called “Skinny Chippin”. It’s basically peels of any seasonal veggies converted into chips. Imagine had I named it garbage chips? That’s what I mean about the PR behind food waste. 

I still haven’t been able to define the cuisine at Fig & Maple; we decided we are a space which is trying to make regional, forgotten, community and tribal food more approachable for the modern consumer. We are trying to introduce you to flavors you haven’t met before and by doing that we are able to highlight the vast biodiversity of the country. We are here to remind you that food is food, not waste. We are not trying to be stand out-ish; we are building a community of farmers and producers and restaurants and chefs all working towards the same goals. The goal of food security.

At the end of the day, all we’re doing is bringing together the myriad colors and forms of nature through the food we grow, the food we create, the food we serve, and the food we eat. No step is too small to create change, and together we must change.

About the Author

Radhika Khandelwal

Chef and Owner, Radish Hospitality, @pandoodle

Radhika Khandelwal moved to Melbourne, Australia at the age of 17 to pursue a degree in Psychology. She began working at a fine dining restaurant to support herself, and sparked a passion for cooking. When she returned to India in 2013, she founded Radish Hospitality, an umbrella company for her restaurants Ivy and Bean (founded 2013) and Fig and Maple (founded 2016). Fig and Maple was founded as a canvas to showcase the vast indigenous biodiversity of India by using local, seasonal, and lesser known ingredients. The arrival of Fig and Maple in Delhi marked the beginning of a new movement in sustainability and was quickly adopted across the city by numerous chefs.

As an advocate of sustainability and a member of the Chef’s Manifesto working to fulfil the objectives of SDG2 (Zero Hunger), Khandelwal launched a 45-day long campaign titled “Be a #ZeroWasteHero”. This campaign raised awareness of issues such as hunger, biodiversity, climate change, and food waste. Radhika – as a Chef and as a food security activist – has spoken and represented India at the the World Economic Forum and the 75th UN General Assembly and has been featured in eminent publications like Salty Magazine, Vogue India, Condé Nast Traveller, The Economic Times, GQ India, The New York Times, Verve, The Hindu, Lifestyle Asia, Indian Express, and many more.

The Oil Palm Fruit 

Oil palm is a unique crop as its fruit produces two different types of oils. Palm oil is obtained from the mesocarp and palm kernel oil from the kernel. Both of these oils are chemically and physically distinct from each other. 

Palm oil and palm kernel oil are mainly made up of triglycerides. Taking advantage of the different melting points, various fat components can be produced through physical separation processes. 

This simple process involves heating the oil at about 70^oC and gradual cooling to induce crystallisation in a controlled environment. Solid portion called stearin and liquid portion called olein are separated through a filtration process. Depending on product requirements, this fractionation process can be further applied on stearin and olein to produce various other types of fat products such as mid-fraction, super olein as well as soft and hard mid-fractions which have different melting profile. 

Versatile and Healthy Fat

In the production of solid fat-based food products such as margarine or shortening, liquid oil will be partially hydrogenated to make it more solid, thus increasing its oxidative stability. However, this process will generate high amount of harmful trans-fats. Trans-fats can be found in common products which uses partially hydrogenated oils or fats as ingredient in their preparation. These ingredients can be in the form of margarine, shortening or frying fats. Consequently, bakery products such as pastries, breads, cakes and biscuits are among foods which commonly contains high levels of trans-fat. Similarly, foods that are fried in partially hydrogenated oil will also contain trans-fat.

Palm oil has natural solid fat and therefore does not require partial hydrogenation. The products are thus free of harmful trans-fats. As a matter of fact, palm oil is a healthier alternative to partially hydrogenated fat. Among the various sources of fats, palm oil is considered the top choice for restaurants and food manufacturers due to its versatility and diversity in application. Below are 10 reasons why palm oil is so highly desirable:

Roles of Fats in Baked Products

The fats used in bakery products performs two important functions. 

1. It enables air to be incorporated in the batter
2. It contributes to the tender texture of the baked products

Good aerating properties require sufficient liquid oil content to enable air bubbles to be formed and the presence of solid fat in the form of small crystals (beta prime form). Large crystals (beta form) would not be effective in trapping and stabilising the air bubble. 

What really happen to the batter or dough during baking process?  During the baking process, water vapour is generated and goes into the air bubble as does the carbon dioxide from the baking powder. The air bubbles become larger but at this stage, the air is still surrounded by fat. As the baking temperature increases, fat melts and eventually egg protein becomes firm so the air bubbles are retained. This is how the cake structure is formed and fixed. A good bakery fat should not melt too quickly during mixing and baking so that air bubbles remain trapped throughout the baking process to impart the desired final texture of products.      

How does Palm Oil Improve the Quality of Bakery Products?

1. Crystallisation in the beta prime form

Beta prime is the desired crystal form in bakery fat such as shortening as it has a very high structure stability. Palm oil and its solid fraction (palm stearin) have a very high stability in the beta prime crystal form compared to other common vegetable oils. 

2. Trans-fat free products can be produced

Palm oil is naturally semi-solid. This composition confers natural stability to the oil without the need for hydrogenation. Consequently, this avoid the presence of harmful trans-fat in the finished products. 

3. Have good functional properties

• Palm oil imparts good creaming volume for cakes and cookies as well as promotes better bread volume. 
• Palm oil-based pastry fat imparts excellent layering for puff pastries, pies, Danish and croissant.
• Palm oil contributes to the final products quality by imparting tenderness, moistness, flavour and texture.
• Palm oil provide good stability with respect to oxidation to bakery fat and bakery products thus prolonged their shelf life. 

As can be seen, the characteristics of fat are important. An ideal fat for bakery products must have small fat crystals, smooth and easily spreadable texture. Palm oil is very effective as a major component for such applications. Sustainable certified Malaysian palm oil is abundantly available which makes it an important ingredient for the bakery industry.