Hey 

Welcome to our 3rd newsletter! We’ve decided to name this weekly affair as The Sunday Letter and it will be delivered to you between 10 am - 1 pm every Sunday.

With these newsletters, we want to share with you the insights we have gained in the last 6 years working in both commercial and home kitchen, observing food in general. We believe these insights can help you manage time and relationship with your food a lot better.

And today, the subject of our fascination is the diversity in our everyday food.

What do you cook at home? In fact, once you finish reading this, go and check out in your fridge. What do you see there? Fruits? Vegetables? Beer? Dairy? And what else?

Do you cook with sauces? Do you buy pre-ground pastes? Or maybe not?

The way food is being cooked in urban Indian households has changed a lot in the last decade or so. It’s now no longer bound by what our mothers or grandmothers used to cook. We can make Roti and Paratha with the same finesse as an Aglio-Olio Pasta.

Our Mondays are for Chinese, Thursdays for Mediterranean, and Saturdays for Burgers. Oh sorry, no Chinese, they’re boycotted for now!

At Dohful, we like to call this The Big Bang Food Theory. According to this theory, different days are for different foods. Whether you are a Maharashtrian or Bengali or Punjabi or Malayali, we're all eating each other's food & much more on a daily basis. You can be a fan of Pizza, Dal Chawal, Fried Rice, Hummus, Aloo Paratha, Bisi bele bath, and Pav Bhaji all at the same time.

My Husband (though we're from North & East India), loves Hyderabadi cuisine and has tried various rice & salan dishes at home. Similarly, I love the Maharashtrian food and making Sabudana Vada at home is pretty common. 

Come to think about it, you’ve probably been living your own version of The Big Bang Food Theory during the lockdown. And it wouldn’t be wrong to assume that some of the recipes you searched off the internet and cooked recently will be repeated again.

And the reason for this diversity is the fact that today, learning about food has become uber easy.

Gone are the days when our mothers used to wait for the 1 pm cookery shows and were dependent on just those for learning about new food items. Today we can learn from anywhere. In fact, learning is happening from multiple specialized sources - people who are experts at what they do.

Like Nisha Madhulika for North Indian food, Marion’s Kitchen for South Asian recipes, and Joshua Weissman for basics of food. In fact, Joshua’s Basque cheesecake became the inspiration for our own eggless version of this delicacy and turns out it’s the only Eggless Basque Burnt Cheesecake recipe on Youtube!

This kind of diversity is newfound for India as we have taken pride in our family recipes for years. 

To understand this even further, we thought of talking to different people and doing a very unique exercise with them. We wanted them to send us a picture of their refrigerator in its current state.

From these refrigerator pics, we made an attempt to unravel their everyday food & eating patterns.

The Expert Opinion

Shumaila is a food stylist, photographer, baker, and food influencer. She has been writing about food since 2010, creating recipes for her own blog and brands as well, documenting all of this on social media. A quick look at her fridge (picture below) tells the story of food diversity & globalization rather beautifully.

Shumaila is living in a family of 3 members including herself. Most of the meals she says are made fresh and consumed the same day. Only meal prep includes Atta for Roti & some homemade bread. 

First look at her fridge re-confirms the fact that she’s a baker. There is a jar of Nutella, cocoa powder, cream cheese, and a lot more for her baking adventures. 

“Given its summers we generally have a jar of some iced drink-  right now its apricot iced tea leftovers, but other times we have chaas/buttermilk, or cold brew” she says. 

Her fridge is almost always stocked with sauces and pastes like Marinara & Tahini (either store-bought or homemade) as well as seeds like Watermelon seeds, Sunflower seeds  & Chia seeds. 

Notice The Big Bang Food Theory here?

From Rotis to homemade bread and from Chaas to Cold Brew Coffee, her food choices are wonderfully diverse. 

And this is just one kind of diversity. 

Ruchika, a banker by profession tells us her food plan for the week has everything from Vada Pav to Lemon Rice (which she picked while she was in Bangalore) to the humble Khichdi. 

Even though it’s all under the Indian food category, notice how the dishes are actually from all over the country?

Sangeeta, 55, a homemaker living with her husband had a unique eating style too. She always keeps 2-3 different kinds of fruits in the fridge. “Fruits make a great no-cooking snack” she says, especially in the summertime. 

Apart from that, we spot in her fridge, bottles of Jalapenos and olives which she says they both enjoy in their salads, etc. 

Go on, look at your own fridge, and see the diversity there! 

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Hope you have enjoyed reading this, and do hit the reply button if you have anything at all to share with us. Also, if you have missed reading our previous newsletters, and still want to access them, check out this.

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P.P.S: Please share this newsletter with your family and friends who you think would be interested in our acute observations of the food world.

P.P.P.S: Have you seen little Chef Kobe? TML.