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Business News/ Mint-lounge / Features/  An afternoon with chef Gaggan Anand
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An afternoon with chef Gaggan Anand

The Thailand-based culinary alchemist gives a 2-hour cooking demo

Chef Gaggan Anand during the cooking demonstration in Mumbai.Premium
Chef Gaggan Anand during the cooking demonstration in Mumbai.

When we got an email invite to attend a cooking demonstration by Thailand-based Gaggan Anand, best known for his eponymous restaurant Gaggan, which stands at No.17 on the list of San Pellegrino World’s 50 Best Restaurants 2014, we jumped at the opportunity. After all, his recent pop-up dinners in Delhi and Mumbai, in association with Cellar Door Hospitality (the team behind Restaurant Week India), were a little out of our eating-out budget, priced at 12,500 per person.

A day before the cooking demo, we managed to sample four of his signature dishes from an impromptu food truck in Lower Parel, Mumbai, set up by the company that brought him to India to create a publicity buzz. Lucky for us, some of the complimentary samplers we got to try—a white chocolate pani puri, a bheja masala pâté, an orb containing dahi papdi chaat and a feather-light dhokla snow—were also part of the demo we attended on 11 September.

Regarding the overpriced pop-up dinner, Gaggan said his team had carried over 160kg of equipment and ingredients from their kitchen in Bangkok. Apart from paying for excess baggage, he explained that many pieces of the cutlery used for the 11-course meal cost between €180-190 (around 14,300-15,000) since they are especially designed and manufactured in Spain to hold each dish. As Gaggan took us through the ingredients and assembly of the white chocolate pani puri, he also passed around a slick, custom-made egg tray-like plate in which the amuse-bouche is usually served.

Between these two dishes, Gaggan also showed us how little blobs of spiced dahi (yogurt) turn into delicate spheres of dahi papdi chaat with thin membranes that quite literally result in a burst of flavours in the mouth, simply using mineral water and alginate. While both these dishes are often attributed as results of molecular gastronomy, Gaggan said he likes to describe this kind of cooking as nothing more than a modernist take on the culinary arts.

As part of the cooking demo, Gaggan also invited his Spanish bartender to prepare his signature creation—the Indie Libre that riffs on Cuba Libre using Thums Up and a gelatin-based foam containing the zest of the Japanese yuzu lemon. Gaggan’s next big plans include setting up a laboratory at his kitchen in Bangkok and to launch a new bar programme for his three-year-old restaurant. The final dish he showed us was a dessert called Made in Japan, a frozen mascarpone ice-cream cake topped with fresh matcha, wasabi and vanilla salt.

While Gaggan said that the pop-up dinners in both Delhi and Mumbai were very successful, he has no plans to set up a restaurant in India any time soon. “I want to focus on getting to the top, to be the best now," he said. “I may do a more mass-appeal eatery, something I’d like to call Café G in a city like Mumbai in the future. If I price these street food snacks, something like the white chocolate pani puri, around 200 a plate, I’m sure I will have customers line up whenever it happens."

Click here for details on Gaggan Anand.

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Published: 16 Sep 2014, 08:10 PM IST
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