The Internet is full of instant chefs with slick instant video recipes. But truly heartfelt chefs don’t follow scripts or worry about stardom
You should trust chefs who tell you to look for freshness, high quality, authenticity and taste
At one point in the YouTube clip, Brar tells a typical Panju joke, the kind that only Panjus find funny.
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“The praji says today he’s in the mood for something light for dinner.”
Light is pronounced lat. Aaj lat kuch khane ka jee kar riya hai.
“The wife makes, you know, there are only three lat dals, tuvar, masoor and mung, so the wife makes tuvar, but she adds a little bit of, see, people add too much mung, that’s up to them, but mung has something lacy and tuvar sometimes separates from the water.”
This is how Brar talks.
“She makes this lat dal, and then she adds this much”—Brar forms a cup with his fist—“this much ghee in the tarka. Praji was in the mood for something light.” He looks up at the camera to see if you caught the irony.
Brar’s food videos are irreverent, abstracted, disconnected, half his mind on the cooking. He doesn’t complete his sentences, he cracks inane jokes with the cameraman, he says things to the pressure cooker, he hums tunelessly. He’s utterly genuine.
That’s why I hit Subscribe within minutes. It’s not every day you find an unaffected epicurean to whom food matters. I have encountered a handful of honest, believable chefs, though, and today, I want you to meet two of them. Just for fun, I’ll throw in a fake at the end.
I should have heard of Ranveer Brar. Everyone else has, it seems. Indian celebrity chef, television personality, Masterchef India judge, author, restaurateur, producer of foodie film producer. I stumbled upon him while searching for a good recipe for Amritsari chholé.
What makes Brar different from, say, Sanjeev Kapoor is that he takes himself with a pinch of salt—and cooks with warmth, affection and reverence. Watch him describe the inner workings of a simple dhaba dal and you might understand how plain boiled lentils garnished with cumin seeds and fried onions can become so utterly awesome in a chef’s hands.
Brar makes me realise that a cuisine can only be as genuine as its cook. Affectionate food made from the heart cannot come from a chef who has one eye on his affiliate links and the sales of his designer ginger-garlic paste. One of Brar’s most touching videos is the one where he brings his mother on to show the world how she makes dal.
Raihana Remtulla doesn’t complete her sentences either. She’s a short busybody in a burkha, nattering in fluent, nuanced American English who really goes out of her way to show you how to make Indian dishes even if you can’t find all the ingredients. She could be from Zanzibar, or downtown San Antonio, Texas, but I’d guess Mumbai was where it began because her family once owned Dairy Queen.
You’d also not guess that effervescent, meticulous Raihana cannot eat a single thing that she cooks. She has been helpless, in pain, and desperately ill most of her life. Starting with ulcerative colitis when she was young, she has undergone colectomy to remove chunks of her intestine, which didn’t, alas, cure the condition. She has been diagnosed with type two diabetes, rheumatoid arthritis and brittle bone disease, and visits the emergency room every month to clear obstructed bowels.
More recently, she was laid low by crippling bronchiectasis. The strenuous coughing broke her ribs and gave her a hiatal hernia.
But while her body kept letting her down, her spirit took flight. She began making home videos of things she loves cooking. In her painstaking real-time introduction to the art of making perfect chapatis, she answers chapati questions I’ve always had—how much water? How long to knead? How long do you let it sit? How do you make them so round?
I love watching Raihana not because she’s a celebrity chef—she is—but because she’s imperfect, unscripted, 100% genuine and full of concern. She really wants you to get it right.
How do you spot a dishonest chef? By watching Sanjeev Kapoor. It takes a certain towering hubris to present time-tested traditional Indian dishes, such as Kerala’s avial, and call it a ‘Sanjeev Kapoor Exclusive Recipe’.
You should trust chefs who tell you to look for freshness, high quality, authenticity and taste. Chef Kapoor is not one of them. In his slick video on how to make dal tadka, the legend recommends that rather than go for real onions, you should buy a certain branded, pre-dried onion pre-cut into slivers. Just soak in water a bit to “hydrate it”, says the chef.
The instant onion brand flashes below Sanjeev Kapoor’s screen, so you get its name clearly. The famous chef tells you he always uses nothing else but this brand.
That, to me, is a good chef gone bad.
Here, viewed from there. C Y Gopinath, in Bangkok, throws unique light and shadows on Mumbai, the city that raised him. You can reach him at cygopi@gmail.com
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The views expressed in this column are the individual’s and don’t represent those of the paper.
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