When croquembouche is no longer gibberish to the urban Indian, it is quite clear that a sweet revolution is taking place—and leading the charge are home bakers and enterprising chefs who have honed their craft with the best
Back in 2007, Neha Arya Sethi, then 22, spent nearly every waking hour crunching numbers and poring over Excel sheets. With a degree in finance from the prestigious Wharton School of Business, she was working as an investment banker in New York. Now, in 2014, numbers are still Sethi’s best friend, but the sleep-deprived and overworked analyst has traded her tailored suit for the chef’s apron and her posh New York workstation for a cubby hole in Lower Parel, Mumbai’s mill-turned-business district. Those numbers, too, are no longer tied to the volatile capital markets; instead they test her proficiency in exactitude: Of flour, butter, sugar, what have you.
Just like our mums and grandmums, Sethi was once a baker by hobby, churning out cookies in small batches and handcrafting them for friends and family. Goaded by her friends, she started selling incognito, out of a small car for a few days a week. When her wares sold out in minutes every single time her staff parked the car in some of Mumbai’s toniest neighbourhoods, she knew it was time to shed her cloak of invisibility and set up her store. The banker-turned-baker stands vindicated as her months-old cookie shop—Sweetish House Mafia—has become the talk of the town and draws in grumpy businessmen, chic socialites and school-going kids alike.
As India gets food-fashionable, the ranks of Sethi are swelling. Cakes, pastries and sweet treats are no longer relegated to the backbenches of gastronomy—they are now the talking points. Pastry chefs are increasingly being celebrated and many are leaving the confines of the restaurant kitchen to strike out on their own. As chutzpah meets business canny, brace for a dessert storm.
Samandari, who came to India to work as a marketing and strategy consultant in 2008, often chafed at the lack of quality croissants and breads. He decided to take matters in his own hands and set up his first outlet in Gurgaon in 2011. In three years, he has clocked nine stores. The ‘sugar rush’ despite the high price points has fuelled his plans to expand pan-India and reach connoisseurs in cities such as Mumbai, Bangalore and Kolkata.
With sights firmly set on authenticity, many Indians are now willing to pack their bags and go abroad to study the art of pastry-making. Pooja Dhingra, who’s got Mumbai hooked on to macarons with her Le15 Patisserie, has never seen so many Indians at Le Cordon Bleu (LCB), her alma mater and one of the finest culinary schools in the world. “When I was training at LCB, I was the only Indian in the class. Now I see 7-8 Indians in each class. The pace of progress in the country has been very, very rapid in the last five years,” says Dhingra.
When Rachel Goenka, pastry chef and co-founder of The Sassy Spoon restaurant in Mumbai, got too lazy to measure out the gelatin for glaze, she ended up with a bowl full of chocolatey gunk. Her words of wisdom? Never mess with the processes of pastry-making. Patisserie is science.
Sumedha Singh
The Rouge, Kolkata
Even a few years ago, there were no cupcakes and macarons in Kolkata. Knowledge about these products started seeping in with TV shows like Masterchef and exposure to foreign travel. As I was travelling around the world, I became familiar with a variety of flavours and textures of desserts. Even in Indian cities like Mumbai and Delhi, cupcakes and macarons seemed to do very well. That’s when I decided to open a store in Kolkata.
A well-balanced dessert is a perfect dessert. When you add some non-sweet elements, like sour and salty, to your dessert, it takes it to another level.
That’s why I like to work with cream cheese; it’s sweet, but it also adds a lemony tang to the dessert. Other bakeries in Kolkata hardly use the ingredient, so it’s one of our biggest USPs.
Modern desserts are expensive because they are delicate and don’t last long. We make our macarons only in batches of 40. We are coming out with some cakes and tarts, which are easy to make. That’ll bring down their costs and will make desserts much more affordable.
(This story appears in the Nov-Dec 2014 issue of ForbesLife India. To visit our Archives, click here.)