Model-turned-chef Aditya Bal shows us that a lifetime is not enough to explore India’s cuisine

Model-turned-chef Aditya Bal believes in celebrating the regional flavours of food. Aditya, who has done a number of travel food shows for various channels, feels the more one travels, the more he/she discovers about Indian cuisine. “The country is a kaleidoscope of many cultures and each culture has a cuisine of its own. A lifetime is not enough to explore all of them,” says the celebrity chef.

Aditya, who started his career as a TV food show host five years back with NDTV Good Times ‘Chak Le India’, has recently launched Spice Craft, his gourmet catering venture in New Delhi. ‘Chak Le India’ was a one of its kind show in Indian television and people instantly connected to it because it was more of a part travel guide and part food guide, he says. “I do not come from a structured hospitality background and this actually had its advantages as far as hosting a travel food show was concerned. The only brief given to me by the show’s makers was to explore far flung areas of the country and bring out the regional cuisines/local flavours,” recalls Aditya. The show became a hit as people started exploring places to see and food options through it.

He had recently hosted the ‘Lost Recipes of India’ show by Epic Channel, which dealt with discovery of dishes that have died out in various parts of the country. Aditya traveled extensively to many interior pockets of the country in search of age-old recipes that have been saved by a few families. According to him, Malabari, Andhra and Bengali cuisines stand out in India.

The chef does not like meddling with traditional recipes. On experimentation being made in the name of food, he says with the mobile culture seeping in, there is an overflow of information about cooking for people. “It’s all mixed up now…to the point of getting irritating. People are becoming too experimental. In the process of adding a new element to a dish, they tend to compromise with the original recipe as a result of which, its nature and essence is lost,” he says, adding that many traditional cuisines are being repackaged now by chefs suiting customer needs and preferences.

These days, he points out, with the changing preference and eating habits of people, the restaurant industry is adapting itself to the changing dynamics.

His best cooking experience, Aditya recalls, was in the larger kitchens of Gurudwara in Amritsar and Jagannath Temple in Puri. “Though I was not allowed inside the Jagannath Temple kitchen, I was told several interesting facts about the Chappan Bhog for Lord Jagannath and the cooking process by the Suara clan (cooks) of the temple. In Gurdwara, the volume of food being prepared by Sevaks and volunteers was mind-boggling. The experience of cooking even the plain Rajma, Roti for Langar in Gurdwara was enriching for me as a chef,” says Bal.

Apart from developing ‘Spice Craft’, Aditya now plans to launch a mobile application on food. “I have cut down on traveling these days and concentrating on assimilating all the information about various cuisines that I collected in the past five years for Spice Craft,” he says. The chef also wants to explore cuisines of the North East in India and South America in the near future. Ask about his favourite food, the celebrity chef replies with a smile, “I am a simple Dal, Chawal and Dahi person. I also like bread and butter and my mom’s plain rice and mutton curry.”

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