‘You may not speak the same language but you can definitely enjoy a meal together’
Chef Sarah Todd talks about the farmtotable food culture in Northeast India, and talks about the area’s unexplored cuisine
It was the year 2014. Sarah Todd, a former model competing in the popular cooking reality show MasterChef Australia, cooked aloo gobhi in one of the episodes. After the episode was telecast here, it instantly won her a massive Indian fan following. Today, Sarah has two restaurants, in Goa and Mumbai, and was in Delhi, recently, to curate the menu for The Wine Company, Gurgaon. Here, she talks about her culinary beginnings, her India connect, and what she thinks of food porn:
FROM RAMP TO KITCHEN
“I started modelling at 18 and modelled for 10 years. During this period, I got to travel all over the world and experience new cultures and cuisine,” says Sarah, recalling her ‘hellish’ first-ever trip overseas to Germany. “Everything that could go wrong went wrong. The only thing that made me happy there was this creamy cold cucumber dish. During this period I realised that you may not speak the same language but you can enjoy a meal together,” she says.
It was the birth of her son that sparked the passion for cooking inside Sarah. “From a model, I became this crazy cake lady who was cooking 5 cakes a week. And my son’s Punjabi grandmother taught me all the Punjabi dishes. Eventually, I enrolled in London’s Le Cordon Bleu — a cooking school in London.”
“After a while, I applied for MasterChef Australia, where I made aloo gobhi. And the rest is history. My social media following increased, and most of the fans were Indian.”
THE INDIAN AFFAIR
Sarah feels that the diversity in the country promises humongous potential for culinary exploration. “I visited Assam and Nagaland and I feel that it’s such an unexplored area. It’s amazing how most restaurants in the northeast are farm-to-table. I tried the amazing bamboo shoot broth in Nagaland. [Also], we’ve recently added a kalari dish (kalari is known as the mozzarella of Kashmir) in our menu,” she says.
DEFINING AUSTRALIAN CUISINE
Sarah says that the local aboriginal cuisine in Australia is sustainable and unexplored as yet. “The cooking techniques are simple and the food is spicy and flavourful. The older generation is familiar with this. The newer generation’s palate is more multicultural. Our weekly meal menu consists of beef stroganoff, which is Russian; Italian spaghetti; fish and chips, which is English; Pad Thai from Thailand.”
INSTAGRAMWORTHY PRESENTATION VS TASTE
Sarah feels that the priority for a chef should be to create healthy, delicious meals that can keep visitors coming. She says, “There is no denying that one eats with their eyes, and not just on social media. No guest would like a messedup plate. However, that doesn’t mean you forcefully make visual additions to the dish. It’s annoying when people add things to a dish that don’t add flavour or in fact, they just dip their fingers into your food just for Instagram — which is a
turn off.”