Ayla by Santosh Shah

Keith Kendrick enjoys Nepali dishes from the Masterchef: The Professionals 2020 finalist and recent winner of its Rematch 2021 spin-off

Many years ago, I backpacked around Nepal, eating dhal for breakfast while staring at the Himalayas. I remember the food being completely different to anything I’d tasted from the sub-continent back in the UK. It was hearty and filling; the kind of thing you needed to warm your bones and give you fuel in the thin mountain air. I didn’t give it much thought when I returned home – until I saw Santosh Shah on Masterchef: The Professionals in 2020. His humble attitude and cooking from his Nepalese heritage earned him the title ‘People’s Champion’, even if he did lose out to talented Essex chef Alex Webb. Judge Marcus Wareing described Santosh’s dishes as ‘magical’ and it took me back to roadside cafés where I’d guzzled chicken-and-ginger-filled momos.

Santosh now oversees the kitchens in The Cinnamon Collection in London, and he’s written a cookbook on the dishes of his homeland. It’s festivals that inspired the book’s title, Ayla. ‘It has many meanings, but to me it means celebrations,’ Santosh says.

You’re going to need some commitment to enjoy this book: some ingredients were unfamiliar to me and need to be sourced at specialist shops (though he does suggest substitutions). These include hing (asafoetida), the dried result of a gummy substance secreted by the root of ferula asafoetida, a cousin of carrot and fennel, cooked in dishes like the black dhal (right). I wanted to make this dish more than any, and recreate that feeling I had some 25 years ago, gazing in awe at Everest. It was spectacular, as was the dhal – though, sadly, not my current view of the block of flats opposite.