Two brothers and pastry chefs from Goa competing in Britain’s popular competition Bake Off: The Professionals, refuse to sugar-coat environment degradation in their home state and use culinary imagination to discuss the immediate threat to 250 hectares of old-growth forest by thoughtless infrastructure
For one challenge in the competition, the brothers prepared a cherry crumble designed to look like a tree with an axe poised above. The dessert represented the Bhagwan Mahaveer Wildlife Sanctuary and Mollem National Park in Goa
As a young boy, Lerrick Coelho, 29, loved experimenting in the kitchen, rustling up dishes to impress his parents and grandmother in the evenings. Celebrity chefs like Gordon Ramsay and Nigella Lawson also played their part in inspiring his early love for food. He recalls that by the time he was in Class VIII, the idea of becoming a professional chef had taken hold of him. At the Institute of Hotel Management, Goa, the interest evolved into a fascination with pastry work, a passion that he honed during a seven-year stint with The Oberoi, Mumbai. Those years, he believes, shaped him both as a person and chef, the exposure vital to what he did later.
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“Operationally, I would rank it higher than what I do now,” says Lerrick in a conversation with mid-day. “Mumbai with its food and bustling streets filled me with so much energy and joy. And the people are great, too.”
For younger brother Lineker, 27, named after English footballer Gary Lineker, quite aptly, football came before food. While he remembers enjoying the meals Lerrick cooked at home, it was only later that he developed his own interest in the field, studying at the Goa College of Hospitality and Culinary Education, and then working at the Radisson Blue.
Lerrick and Lineker Coelho
The brothers, who have both been in London for some years, are currently representing the Sofitel London St James at the Bake Off: The Professionals, where teams of pastry chefs compete against each other. While Lerrick is a chef at the hotel, Lineker is attached to the Ampersand Hotel in South Kensington.
Late last year, after a long wait following a rigorous audition round, the brothers found out that they had been accepted for the show. What followed were weeks of fervent preparation. “There would be days when I would wake up in the middle of the night with an idea and go down to the kitchen and try it out,” says Lerrick, who had sought permission to stay at the hotel to avoid commuting as the virus raged everywhere. Lineker who was furloughed at the time, joined him in these sessions.
The brothers recall being struck by the scale of production of the show and admit that they learnt much from their fellow contestants. Cooking in front of the camera though, posed an early challenge. “I thought we would have to cook in front of one camera, but there were three stationary ones, and one moving, to ensure they got a complete 360-degree shot of what we were doing. Before the camera, even things you’ve been doing for years suddenly make you nervous. Besides, they ask questions to keep you talking while working. As professional chefs, we don’t do that,” says Lerrick, who remembers getting used to the distractions after the initial days of feeling overwhelmed. Lineker adds, “During the first two challenges, every time I saw the camera approaching, I would run towards the fridges.”
For one of the challenges, the contestants were asked to reinvent a crumble and the brothers came up with their abstract tree creation. They remember practising for the show around the time when protests in Goa were at a peak. Inspired and moved by the impending threat to the Mollem National Park and the adjoining Bhagwan Mahaveer Sanctuary posed by three large-scale infrastructure projects, they designed their cherry crumble to look like a tree with an axe ominously poised above it.
Mollem and the Bhagwan Mahaveer Sanctuary cover a protected area of 240 sq km in the Western Ghats, its forests home to the Dudhsagar waterfalls, nearly 60,000 trees and hundreds of endemic species of flora and fauna, including 235 species of birds, Bengal tigers, leopards, panthers, pangolins and Goa’s state animal the gaur. It is recognised by UNESCO as one of the world’s eight biodiversity hotspots and includes a proposed tiger reserve. As a result of proposals approved by the National Board for Wildlife in December 2019 and April 2020, barely two weeks into India’s first Coronavirus lockdown, it is presently the target of three massive infrastructure projects: the doubling of a railway line through the jungle, a highway expansion and an electric power transmission line.
The proposals sparked widespread opposition across the state and has drawn steady national and international attention. Hundreds of concerned citizens, activists, students, artists, scientists and tourism bodies have written to Union Environment Minister Prakash Javadekar and the Supreme Court asking for the projects to be abandoned. While done purportedly for the state’s development, protesters question the way in which the projects were cleared without any transparency or public consultation and believe that their real intention is to turn the state into a corridor for increased coal imports by interests close to the Centre. But what these projects launched was a powerful, millennial-driven agitation with a young, alert and determined section of the citizenry spearheading the Save Mollem movement with campaigns bringing local communities together and mobilising various groups to raise awareness through art, science, social media, all-night vigils and demonstrations, even risking charges and arrests. The Coelhos’ decision to use the competition’s platform to raise awareness around this looming threat to Goa’s natural heritage must be seen as part of a larger environmental consciousness displayed by young Goans in the past year. It has been joyously welcomed by groups like the Amche Mollem page on Instagram, inspiring new efforts to include more voices to the cause.
The brothers share that London’s diverse culture has pushed them to raise their game and make their food more distinctive. “We are from India but we are not Indian chefs so to speak,” says Lerrick, who is interested in passing on his skills through teaching to help the next generation interpret food in new ways. Their Indian backgrounds, however, give them an innate knowledge of spices and different flavour combinations, helping them mix spice with sweet and harmonise dissimilar tastes.
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