A meal in one shot
One-pot meals are always a favourite with cooks and B Ramakrishnan has made such cooking a science in itself with minimal prep time
Butter chicken in 6 minutes, mutton biryani in 12 minutes, aviyal in 5 minutes! Does this sound impossible? Actually, it’s perfectly doable. All you have to do is use the One Pot One Shot (OPOS) technique. OPOS, an easy cooking style developed created by B. Ramakrishnan from Chennai, has set off a kitchen revolution and garnered a cult following across the globe.
“OPOS simplifies cooking by deconstructing recipes. It doesn’t require any fancy equipment or massive prep and is both quick and healthy. Ingredients are layered in a pressure cooker, and the food cooks in its own juices at the highest possible heat in the shortest possible time,” says Ramakrishnan, author of The Complete OPOS Cookbook — One-Pot Meal Plans Ready in 10 Minutes. The Complete OPOS Cookbook features meal plans spanning regional and international cuisines and includes popular recipes along with new ones.
“The goal of this cookbook is to help you cook freely, by physically unchaining you from the kitchen, mentally unchaining you from cuisines and psychologically unchaining you from concepts like ‘tradition’ and ‘authenticity’,” says Ramakrishnan, a restaurateur who is an alumnus of XLRI Jamshedpur.
He believes he has unlocked the pressure cooker's secret to making flavourful food.
“I was not even aware cooking was problematic to most people. As an engineer, I assumed this problem had been solved ages back and all I had to do was pick up a cookery book to make food,” says Ramakrishnan.
How is this cookbook different from the thousands of others? The author says, “When I tried making sambar the first time, following a well-respected cookbook, I felt cooking should not be so complicated. This book is all about setting you free from recipes and cuisines. It lets you combine anything with pretty much anything to create whatever you wish, across cuisines, in minutes.” He says the recipes took a year to compile. They were then tried out repeatedly by Indian families across the world and validated.
Ramakrishnan has also written OPOS Cookbook: 5 Minute Magic, an e-book of recipes.
THE MANY PLUSES OF OPOS
Ramakrishnan says, “I would experiment with OPOS when I had to cook in my wife’s absence, or make an additional item for lunch or dinner. Slowly, using OPOS, I took over cooking lunch and dinner, and made them effortlessly. The family began wondering why we had employed a cook when tasty and healthy dishes can be made so quickly. Our oil consumption dropped drastically, and we couldn’t believe how much oil we had been guzzling because of our cook’s traditional methods of preparing food.
OPOS TO THE RESCUE
COVID-19 struck our family. We opted to remain at home, instead of being hospitalised. We had to be in quarantine, along with our 12year-old. OPOS rasam and pressure-baked vegetables kept us going through the illness and helped us recover from the accompanying weakness. OPOS also ensured that we never had too many dishes to wash during the tough days.
In traditional Indian cooking, vegetables are cooked to death. They only need 5 minutes of cooking time. High heat, no water and short time are the best ways to bring out the right colour, texture and flavour from most food.