Why Slow Food is Catching On,
Slowly
"Good, clean and fair", eco-chic,
locally sourced and traditional cuisines find a firmer footing within Indian
restaurants -long after trending globally
Terra Madre Day, Mother Earth Day, is still some
time away (that's in December) but even on Earth Day (this month, April 22), it
is fitting that we spare some thought to what is increasingly becoming an over
riding concern on planet food: Slow Food -“good, clean and fair“, the opposite
of “fast“, cooked using traditional methods and ingredients grown cleanly and
trad ed in fairly by producers and consumers.
It seems like an obvious proposition, only it
isn't. Ever since it was kickstarted by Carlo Petrini in Rome in the mid-1980s,
the Slow Food movement (initially, a response to the McDonaldisation of the
world) has been garnering steady support from different quarters: chefs,
activists, farmers and diners.
In recent years, “Slow“ has steadily become a
red hot fad too -with everyone from the world's top luxury restaurants to chefs
at the culinary cutting-edge, pop-up planners in forests and fields, hosts of
foraged lunches and ladies-who-lunch, all espousing the philosophy. Every
April, for instance, sees a fair bit of these activities all over the world
based on such ideas of sustainable eating. And, now, gastronomy in India too,
is waking up to the magic words -even if they may leave some of us who've
always bought our veggies from the mandi and gur and mustard fresh from the
farmers, a wee bit perplexed. But we will come to that.
Last month, an India chapter of the Slow Food
chef 's charter (a voluntary collective of chefs who work with the tenets of
Slow Food) was launched. There were a slew of introductory dinners -from Mumbai
and Delhi to Shillong (with chefs from 10 Meghalaya tribes preparing a showcase
dinner in the presence of Fa bio Antonini, a leading Slow Food chef from
Amsterdam) -to ostensibly spread the idea of using locally grown, fresh ingredients
in menus based on not just regional but “world“ cuisines too.
Already, trendsetting restaurants in the country
are attempting such specially-crafted menus. At Olive Bar and Kitchen, Delhi,
for instance, chef Sujan Sarkar is all set to roll out a nine-course,
pairedwith-wine Slow Food menu every Thursday for a limited group of 20 in his
studio kitchen. Ahead of its unveiling -first to a bunch of American Express
Black Card holders -I tasted the menu and came back impressed not just with its
inventiveness but with the sourcing too.
From fermented gooseberry (a 13-day process;
hence also “Slow“ food) with a faux-Oreo (charcoal, cheese and flour cookie
sandwiching local goat-cheese) to a palm-heart and “mitti-aloo“ (a yam-like
tuber) cornetto to a stellar plate with the Kashmiri kalari cheese with morels
and walnut-thecha, the menu has ingredients from within the country and serves
contemporary cuttingedge food, at par with any modern restaurant across the
globe.
But what is most striking is the ascribing of
origin to each ingredient: There's “Gayatri-farm“ chicken, “4S“ buttermilk,
“Jaya“ rice et al. It's what you usu ally see only on international menus
-where “Maine“ lobster or “Kobe“ beef or “Iberian“ ham get pride of place. In
India, on the other hand, menus may still tom-tom provenance but only of luxury
imported ingredients: Australian lamb, North Atlantic salmon (ironical given
the country's own vast produce).
Part of the problem, of course, has to do with
quality procurements domestically. “If I give you `Yamuna fish' on the menu,
would you eat it?“ asks chef Manish Mehrotra of Indian Accent. In Sarkar's own
nine-course menu, there are only three non-vegetarian plates because of the
difficulty in getting hold of steady and quality supply of local meats. “I have
been trying to get sting ray, but I need to be sure that I will get enough
regularly...suppliers overpromise,“ he says. That is something all chefs in
India battle with.
On Global Plate
In Italy and other parts of Europe, agrarian
economies combined with this new global barometer of hipness means that
provenance plays an important role in selling plates. There are both enough
small producers of craft cheese, meats, organic growers and fisheries and
enough chefs sourcing the ingredients from them to provide top-of-the-line
dining experiences. The scale of what's available for chefs (as well as
individual consumers) to play around with is, in fact, bewildering.
At the 10th Salone del gusto in Turin in
September last year, I was witness to an array of European hand-crafted
agriproducts; all “special“: from Cevrin di Coazze, a rare raw milk cheese
(produced between March and November and aged for minimum three months) from
the Sangone valley to fried olives from Marche to the granular Modica chocolate.
Almost 1,200 exhibitors showed off their wares.
This focus on micro-regional and often heritage
ingredients may be part of the Slow Food network in Italy and southern Europe,
but even in other parts of the world, local gastronomy is an incredibly chic
trend ruling kitchens -much more than, say, what dazzles us in India currently:
molecular gastronomy.
Back to Basics
For a while now, modern cuisine globally has
been focussing not just on technique but quality and provenance to define
itself as “cutting edge“. Scandinavian cui
sine, for instance, is bed-rocked in local
gastronomy -elk, ants and all. As is everything else from Australian to
Californian. It is not enough to suspend belief with the magic realism of
liquid nitrogen.
What is considered chic may, in fact, be
something that takes you back to basics.Brothl, in Melbourne, is a much-touted
venture by eco-enthusiast 8 chef Joost Bakker. It is a restaurant devoted to
only broth -produced by using unused bones and offal from Melbourne's top
restaurants (that are named). The recycled ingredients are stewed in rainwater
-from Monbulk, a nearby town (notice the attention to provenance) for 48 hours
to create Joost's sustaining and sustainable broth! If that is an extreme
example, what is fairly regular now in most top gourmet regions is chefs
devoting attention to things like their own vegetable patches or beehives (for
rooftop honey). They are also carefully handpicking farms and working alongside
farmers to give you the freshest in your glass or plate. In fact, anyone
associated with luxury dining is working this trend -including airlines.
British Airways, for instance, makes it a point to tell you that all
ingredients in its club class menu are re sponsibly sourced, including fish
from Marine Stewardship Council-certified sustainable fisheries.
In India, on the other hand, such things are
hardly easy. We may have a huge biodiversity but the pressure on the land means
that traditional (and often sustainable) farming practices come few and far
between and are thus expensive. Also, “while we may grow the best tomatoes in
Gulbarga, the best lime in Rangpur or the best hapus in Ratnagiri, most of
these are exported and there's hardly any available for the domestic market“,
points out chef Manu Chandra of Olive Bangalore, The Fatty Bao and Monkey Bar.
Chandra, who has worked with local ingredients, incorporating the likes of
bathua in soups, cholai, local cucumber and amaranth in highend dishes, serving
Lakshwadeep yellow fin tuna, Kerala beef carpaccio and local mozzarella in his
Med-led menus, talks about the challenges of sourcing the best Indian
ingredients without necessarily becoming elitist.
Chefs can trawl the local mandis for seasonal
indigenous produce or invest in teams to work out credible supply chains “but
only very few small, upsacle, chef-led restau rants can do this“, he adds.
The new trend of young, foreign educated or
hobby-turned-profes sional farmers working with or ganic or sustainable
practices has helped upscale restau rants source their re quirements (includ
ing foreign vegeta bles and herbs) but because these are necessarily small
scale farms, prices are quite high.
Rediscovery of India
F&B professional Kunal Chandra, who studied
at the Slow Food International's university in Bra, Italy, adds: “The point is
to make things accessible to regular users and not just high-society ladies....
In Italy, we once bought an entire crate of damaged tomatoes for just 1 at a
farmer's market and made sauce for pasta for three months... we need things
like that in India.“
Actually, India does have them. Much before the
ad vent of the fashionable farmers' markets, the mandis, omnipresent in almost
all Indian towns, including the metros, served that function of being the
authentic interface between growers and consumers. Because of the lack of
storage facilities and limited organised retail, they, luckily for us, still
abide. It is simply a question of rediscovering them. At least the Indian
consumer seems to be rediscovering a taste for the local, over the aspirational
imported. And it extends to not just ingredients but cuisines too. Some of the
hottest restaurants around these days are neither luxury nor foreign-cuisine
driven. Instead, they present traditional food in different guises. Café Lota
in Del hi, overwhelmingly busy every day of the week, serves up bits and pieces
of pahari food, UP kathal ki biryani, Assamese and Kerala style fish cur ries
and more. There are other casual restaurant chains, all at tempting Indian
regional cui sine, from dabeli to berry pulao in younger formats.
In Kolkata, chef Joy Banerjee of Bohemian uses
local, seasonal ingredients to do his version of Bengali-fusion, while there is
The Bombay Canteen's chef Floyd Cardoz, working with a larger vision of
creating an internationally chic restau rant with Indian ingredients, flavours
and techniques. Catering services like Caara in Delhi and restaurants like The
Table in Mumbai also work with fresh and local ingredients (the latter sources
much from its owners' farm in Lonavala) and have made eco-chic dining a new
trend.
Corporate Culture
Finally, there are corporate behemoths taking an
interesting new direction too. ITC Hotels, for instance, has recently mandated
that all its menus have colour-coded dishes categorised as “local“, “forgotten
grains“, “heart healthy“ and more. Seafood is colourcoded too to represent fish
that you can choose but that may be endangered, overfished, or freely
available. “We leave the choice to the customer, but at least it is a process
of education,“ says chef Manisha Bhasin.
All this seems to be part of the larger phi
losophy driving F&B experiments at the chain, whose corporate chef Manjeet
Gill is one of the biggest proponents of Slow Food in India -from the whole
wheat amal naan at Bukhara to field-fresh mustard used in the new “Mewati“
cuisine incubating at the Grand Bharat, where chefs in fact have been going to
local farmers to buy their mustard and to village shops to buy other groceries.
Meanwhile, at Olive Delhi, Sujan Sarkar now has
a list of 160 ingredi ents that can be reliably sourced from local producers
and used in his men us. He also has a dedicated chef to re search these
linkages. With so much invested in going green-chic, Slow is bound to catch on,
fast.
Anoothi
Vishal
ETM12APR15
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