With a celebratory lineup of the International Women’s Day (March 8), Holi (March 13), IPL (which starts on March 22) and then Eid-ul Fiitr (April 1) marking the end of Ramadan, a month of fasting and feasting, this is that time of the year when the weather transitions from spring to summer, and as it does, our desire to gorge on good food scales the peaks of gluttony.
Appropriately therefore, our guest for this edition of ‘Food Talk with Sourish Bhattacharyya’ is Arjita Kalra, a practitioner of vegan cooking and champion of healthy eating. Deviating from our usual practice, we have invited celebrity chef Dhruv Oberoi, who has been shepherding the Olive Bar & Kitchen (No. 6 on the Top 100 Restaurants list of ‘Conde Nast Traveller’) and The Grammar Room.
The presence of Dhruv, in fact, provided an industry perspective to the wealth of knowledge that Arjita Kalra shared with us. He was particularly impressed by Arjita talking about food being ‘gut friendly’ – he said issues as critical as this to our well-being never gets even talked about in restaurant kitchens. What made Arjita, who’s famous at We The Chefs for her beetroot halwa, turn to food to find remedies to challenges to our health?
As she pointed out at the start of our conversation, her husband suffers from Irritable Bowel Syndrome (IBS) and she from PCOD (Polycystic Ovary Disease), which she reversed by altering her diet. She turned to millets much before these super grains made news in the United Nations-designated year (2023) dedicated to them and also began her search for alternatives to refined sugar.
This ‘vegan evangelist’, which is how Arjita is described in the show, has been associated with We The Chefs since 2023, and her best-sellers over the past two years have been her chocolate mocha and chocolate orange cakes made with sprouted jowar flour, and of course, her roasted millet ‘chivda’. To prepare the ‘chivda’, she uses only cold-pressed peanut oil (she’s absolutely against palm oil as she should be) at the rate of 1 gram for every 250 grammes of the finished product.
At this point, we turned to Dhruv, who had been listening to Arjita with a lot of interest. Dhruv he specialises in European cuisine, and has the distinction of working at Ferran Adria’s El Bulli restaurant in Spain (which was for many years rated as the world’s No. 1 till it shut down some years ago), yet he is a vocal promoter of local ingredients, starting from ‘amla’ (Indian gooseberry), ‘aam ada’ (mango ginger) and ‘karamcha’ (‘karonda’ or Bengal currant) sourced from local farmers. It this love for local ingredients that he shares with our home chefs.
Referring to a conversation he had had with Arjita just before the shoot, Dhruv mentioned how she had talked about her muffins being ‘gut friendly’ and said: “I must share our conversation with my chefs back at Olive because in our kitchens we never once talk about what is best for people’s health. We need to talk more about how to make our food healthier for our guests. My interaction today has inspired me to do so.”
Talking about her own experience of using food as a healing agent, Arjita said she had been able to reverse her PCOD after seven years of moving onto a millets-led diet. Not that she only switched over to millets, she also went back to the basics. For instance, she only uses wheat from her hometown Khairthal and she adds the bran (‘chokar’) that is discarded during the milling process to the wheat she picks up for her bakery products. This simple move makes the wheat fibre-rich and that in turn makes Arjita’s muffins “gut friendly,” which is what she was telling Dhruv before the shoot.
“Did you study all this at a hotel management school?” Dhruv asked Arjita. She said she had never been to one such school, so all she did was combine her passion for cooking healthy with the scientific knowledge her husband, who’s an IIT alumnus, brings to the table.
Talking about millets, Arjita said that people are being misled about these super grains. To make millet flour easier to handle, producers add corn starch, rice starch or tapioca flour, she pointed out. Arjita, in fact, uses sprouted millets because these are pre-digested and therefore lighter on the gut.
“There are a lot of dos and don’ts with millets,” Dhruv chipped in. “Studies are now showing that you cannot mix millets and that dishes prepared with five millets are not helpful at all. Millets also need to be tenderised; they are otherwise very hard to digest.”
Dhruv was all praise for Arjita. He confessed that restaurateurs shy away from beetroot because they think it is impossible to make it interesting. All that they have succeeded in doing is invent the beetroot and goat cheese salad – and it figures at the bottom of the sales reports of most restaurants! But at We The Chefs, Arjita is wowing people with her beetroot halwa!
With Holi round the corner, Arjita is making it healthy by air frying her ‘gujiyas’, replacing ‘khoya’ with cashew powder or cashew butter, and opting for jaggery or sugar extracted from dates, instead of refined sugar. Date sugar also goes into Arjita’s cashew dates barfi, which is her replacement for the sugar-rich ‘kaju katli’. “Everyone who eats what I make say gut pe heavy nahin laga,” Arjita declared with a palpable sense of achievement.
“The gut is related to mental health,” Dhruv explained. “People need to understand this. The healthier our gut, the better our mental health.” The chef added that meal timings are as important as eating healthy. “I keep advising my chefs to eat at the right intervals and follow a cycle,” Dhruv said. “Many of my young chefs work late at night, so they have to eat late, but they should accordingly adjust their meal timings. It is all about how you train your body.”
Food, as practitioners of ayurveda have been emphasising for centuries, is the best medicine. Get your food right and your body will make fewer complaints. If you do not believe in this home truth, then listen to your gut – it never lies.