Masala Trails

A few minutes ago, I watched a popular Asian chef attempt a fusion dish on his TV show. He topped a traditional Rajasthani millet porridge with caramelized guavas and white-truffle oil. The porridge and the guavas would have been interesting, but the truffle oil seemed over-the-top. The millet used was probably bajra, a poor man’s food, with a fairly strong nutty flavour of its own. It seemed a crime to combine them. It was almost like “When in doubt, throw in a truffle”! The chef’s irreverent antics were also annoying and smacked of a singular disrespect for the culture he was visiting.

It reminded me of another food show a few years ago, on which a popular English chef – whose past series on cuisines around the world have been a treat to watch – flung bowlfuls of turmeric into “curries” with ridiculous abandon. He obviously knew nothing about the ingredient, its properties or its taste and even less about the order of cooking Indian food: never browning onions for curries, adding sour ingredients before the spices in a dish are cooked and making a ton of unforgivable mistakes that anyone with even a modicum of knowledge of Indian cuisine would be appalled by!

And then there was the British Michelin-starred chef who left “hell’s kitchen” to escape to India. On arrival, he was met by a local news channel host and invited to go out into the bylanes of real India and discover what real Indians eat. So what did he do? He found the remotest bylanes he could. In Lucknow, he cooked an elaborate biryani in which a goat was stuffed with something that was stuffed with something that was... well you get the idea. He then went on to hunt boar and eat ant chutney with a remote tribe in Nagaland, eat a naga chili, the hottest chili in the world, cook a full goat in the ground in Rajasthan. It was an interesting show to watch, and he had far more respect for the local cuisine and the people he met than the other hosts did, but the salt of the matter is this: This isn’t what the majority of real Indians eat.    

Don’t get me wrong: I have the utmost respect for each of these gentlemen, and I do not believe that I know any more than they do. I don’t even blame them – Indian cuisine is vast and impossible to squeeze into a few hours of airtime. But I do feel that they could follow a few rules. No matter where in the world we live, the food we eat today is a result of our ancestors experimenting with all sorts of strange ingredients and cooking methods prior to settling on the best form of the ingredient to use and the best method to use it in. The rules for Indian cuisine were laid a long time ago, and there is sound reason behind every method and practice.  

Indian cuisine and spices have been eulogized and “exoticized” to such an extent that their reputation precedes them, inspiring – at the very least – a reluctance to try them and – in extreme cases – ABJECT FEAR! So vast are both of these subjects that it is easy to get lost in the maze of sometimes half-baked information available. It is true that in India, spices permeate everything. They are used for pest prevention, valued for their medicinal qualities and, of course, flavour our food in myriad ways. But they are not tossed into our food in handfuls arbitrarily; their use is far more subtle. Whether doled out in generous pinches from the recycled containers in street food stalls or sprinkled delicately from a stainless steel spice box at home, the use of spices in Indian cuisine is as judicious today as it was when spices were used as currency during the age of the spice trade.

Ever since I began food writing, I have travelled all over the world. And every time I returned from exploring the gastronomic underbelly of some delicious foreign locale, I would dream of creating a food itinerary of India. I needed a strong partner, however, to make this come together. Almost as if the food gods were listening, my sister, Himanshi, director of a travel company, supported my dream and brought it that much closer!

Soon I had conceived my culinary tour. Masala Trails – which is what I decided to name it – would take spicy side trips on roads less eaten in India. But it was easier said than done! What we did not realize then was that we had an uphill road ahead of us. A good idea is intangible until it becomes reality, and with Masala Trails, we had a lot of ground to cover! India’s culinary landscape is so vast that the cuisine changes every 50 kilometres, and most of its delicious culinary secrets have not yet been discovered. And the kind of stuff we were looking for – culinary experiences off the “eaten” track – were not easy to find. Culinary tourism in India is an unrecognized, uncategorized sector. And the unique experiences we wanted – that would take visitors and Indians alike beyond the “curries” and exotica to the sort of food real Indians eat – were not searchable on Google or available in travel guides.

And so we embarked on a year of rushing about discovering India. We hit the ground running, looking for the sort of experiences we wanted. We ate innumerable meals of all kinds, in all sorts of places, checked out hundreds of hotels, big and small, inspected thousands of rooms, ate some more, slept in a different bed every night for days on end, ate some more again, explored all sorts of lanes and even littler lanes, ate a lot more and, finally, exhausted and a few kilos heavier, returned home to bring together an experience we believe will be satisfying to foodies like me. 

Over the last month, the first Masala Trails came together. It would wind through some of India’s most vibrant cities: Kolkata, Hyderabad, Cochin, Goa, Mumbai, Delhi, Agra and Rajasthan, and truly take the food traveller off the eaten track into lesser-known regional cuisines. The carefully selected experiences, designed to bring out the full flavour of Indian cuisine, range from street food, home kitchens, fine dining and market tours to demonstrations with expert cooks and chefs, local food artisans and intimate contact with local regional cuisines, food ways and traditions.

Masala Trails has slowly simmered into a delicious aromatic dish that we are ready to serve up, and, through it, I hope to realize a lifelong dream of showcasing the rich culinary heritage of my country.

For more information on Masala Trails click through: www.beaconholidays.com.au

or write to:  masalatrails@beaconholidays.com.au 

For any Masala Trails inquires in Mumbai/India please speak with Devanshi Parikh at Tel: +91 22 40418888.

Residents of all other countries can get in touch with Himanshi Munshaw-Luhar at Mob: +61410369727, Tel: 1800667791, Fax : 1800667824