What India cooks during the monsoon

Mint

18-07-2025

The monsoon is a season of contrasts. The overcast skies make way for hope of a bountiful harvest. Paddy fields get a lush makeover, and wild greens spring up out of nowhere in the mountains. On the coast, life takes a turn when the southwesterlies arrive nudging the fishermen to return home, and stock up on supplies to brave the wet months. Between abundance and scarcity, culinary action peaks during the monsoon, showcasing the endless possibilities that seasonal produce offers.
Lounge speaks to cookbook authors, chefs, restaurateurs, food growers, fermenters and researchers across the country, about their favourite monsoon ingredients, especially those that evoke memories of another time.
We have also curated some recipes for you to cook, especially when the incessant rain gets too much to bear. Give them a shot, won't you?
AMRITA BHATTACHARYA
CULINARY RESEARCHER & CHEF, BOLPUR, WEST BENGAL
Although Bengalis sing paeans about ilish or hilsa (my favourite too), I am equally excited about various types of fruits and uncultivated greens growing on our farm in Bolpur. I have vivid memories of picking kamranga or star fruit while studying on the Santiniketan campus. We never really allowed them to ripen, which is why I always thought it was sour. When I grew up, I discovered that it had a lovely sweet profile. The best way to enjoy it is as a maakha, by slicing the fruit and tossing it with cumin and red chilli powder, or adding some kashundi (fermented mustard relish) for that extra zing. I also make a dish of small river fish or prawns with it. We have kamranga growing in abundance right now, allowing everyone their share in the ecosystem, from birds to insects and bats.
KAMRANGA-R AMISH AMBOL
(prawn curry with star fruit)
Ingredients
2 star fruits (kamranga)
1 small ball of ripe tamarind
200g small shrimp/prawns
Half tsp black mustard seeds
1-2 dried red chillies
Salt to taste
Turmeric powder
A small piece of jaggery (or sugar)
A pinch of red chilli powder
1-2 tbsp oil
Method
Slice the star fruits and set aside.
Soak the tamarind in water, extract the pulp and keep it ready.
Clean the shrimps, marinate with salt and turmeric and lightly sauté them. Set aside.
Heat oil in a pan. Once hot, temper with mustard seeds and dried red chillies. Add the tamarind water, salt, turmeric and red chilli powder. Let it come to a boil. Add the jaggery and star fruit slices. Simmer for a few minutes. Add the shrimps and cook for 2-3 minutes, avoid overcooking.
Remove from heat and let it cool to room temperature. Serve with hot rice.
SHRADDHA ADHIKARI
CO-FOUNDER, MOHRAAN FARMS, SAKURLI, MAHARASHTRA
My family runs a food forest and a farm stay in Sakurli. This land was purchased by my father-in-law—a former teacher from Mumbai—around 40 years ago, and he planted several fruit trees. In 2020, we moved into the farm and started working with the indigenous communities such as the Thakars to understand their knowledge systems, and ways of naturally regenerating a food forest. We have a mix of plants—cultivated seasonal and perennials, which yield food every year, and uncultivated seasonal and perennial wild varieties, which grow without human intervention. During the monsoon, we forage for several wild varieties such as the tender shoots of moringa and colocasia. The Malabar spinach also grows very well in the rains, which is cooked as a bhaji. Whenever we come across new veggies, we try it several times with different cooking methods to understand their nature. Only after that do we cook them for the guests. The most important thing is identification and mindful harvesting so that these ingredients are available to the next generation of communities, who are the original custodians of the land. We now know when to take the tender shoots of a plant or some part of the tuber. You need to be careful while cooking these as well. Some might be too bitter, sour or toxic. Take, for instance, the shevala, which needs to be cooked with another wild vegetable like kakad and a souring agent to make it palatable. These days, we are cooking dinda, or the Leea microphylla, with dry fish and coconut. Though this tree is a perennial variety, its tender shoots and flowers appear only during the rains. We forage for these and serve it with a rice bhakri or as a side dish.
WILD DINDA LEAVES WITH DRY PRAWNS
Ingredients
I large bunch of tender dinda leaves
1 big bowl of dry prawns or any dry fish
2 large onions, roughly chopped
Half cup of dry coconut (grated and roasted in 1 tsp oil)
A handful of peanuts
1 tsp of red chilli powder
Half tsp turmeric powder
Salt to taste
Half tsp cumin seeds
Half tsp mustard seeds
2-3 tbsp of oil
Method
Wash the tender dinda leaves thoroughly. Roughly chop and boil them along with peanuts in a pot with little water for about 10 minutes, until slightly tender.
Roast the grated dry coconut in a spoonful of oil until golden, grind it coarsely in a mixer and set aside.
In a heavy-bottomed pan, heat 2–3 tbsp of oil. Add mustard seeds and cumin seeds. Let them splutter. Add the chopped onions and sauté until light golden. Mix in red chilli powder, turmeric, and salt. Add the washed dry prawns and sauté for a couple of minutes.
Add the boiled dinda leaves and peanuts to the pan. Stir well. Now add the ground roasted coconut and mix. Cook on low heat for another 10 minutes, allowing all the flavours to come together.
ADITHYA KIDAMBI
CO-FOUNDER, MOSSANT FERMENTARY, BENGALURU
At every kitchen I've been part of, pumpkin has found a permanent home on the menu. It's a humble ingredient but its versatility and warmth make it a chef's favourite—especially during the monsoon. At our restaurant, we celebrate it through a curried pumpkin rissois: velvety, spiced pumpkin tucked into crisp, golden pockets. One of my all-time favourite combinations is roasted pumpkin with goat cheese, garlic, burnt butter, and toasted walnuts. There's something deeply comforting about the earthy sweetness of pumpkin meeting the tang of goat cheese and the nuttiness of brown butter. The crunch of walnuts brings it all together with a satisfying contrast. Whether in a European-style preparation or infused with Indian spices, pumpkin always delivers—rich, nostalgic and grounding. It's more than seasonal, it's soulful. And as the rain drums on the roof, few things feel as right as a dish built around this golden, generous vegetable.
NAMBIE JESSICA MARAK
CHEF & FOOD CONSULTANT, WEST KHASI HILLS DISTRICT, MEGHALAYA
In my small village of Upper Rangsa in West Khasi Hills in Meghalaya, rain brings a variety of native greens and vegetables. One of my favourite things to eat is bamboo shoots, which we never buy from the markets but forage for during this time of the year. We enjoy them fresh and preserve the excess for the rest of the year. The recipes are very simple; we eat them mostly as a stir-fry or with dried fish or in dals with bare minimum spices. Every year, I look forward to masoor dal which my mum makes with fresh shoots. Back in the village, we also harvest them, and gather around in circles, to preserve the young shoots. The elders use the edges of a steel tumbler to chop them into big chunks and put them in big jars. It's a fun sight as everyone is in sync, making a unique melody of the chopping sound. By winter, my mum brings out her jars and pickles them, and it's something I have not mastered yet.
STIR-FRIED BAMBOO SHOOTS
Ingredients
1 cup fresh bamboo shoots, thinly sliced
1 tbsp mustard oil
1 tsp ginger-garlic paste
2–3 dried red chillies, adjust to taste
One-fourth tsp turmeric powder
Water to boil
Salt
Method
Thinly slice the bamboo shoots. Boil in plenty of water with a little salt for 8–10 minutes to remove its raw smell and bitterness. Strain and keep aside.
Heat mustard oil in a pan. Add ginger-garlic paste and fry for a few seconds. Toss in the dried red chillies and a pinch of turmeric. Add the strained bamboo shoot slices and stir well, letting everything come together for 2–3 minutes.
Serve hot with steamed rice or rotis.
POOJA PANGTEY
FOOD RESEARCHER & FERMENTER, KARJAT, MAHARASHTRA
There are a bunch of monsoon ingredients that I miss from back home in Uttarakhand, especially when I get chai-pakoda cravings. One of them is jarag or Indian pokeweed (Phytolacca acinosa), a wild edible plant. The tender leaves are used to make crispy pakodas. There's phaphar, buckwheat greens or Himalayan tartary buckwheat that grows at higher altitudes, and bhaangjeera, or perilla/shiso leaves. They are all eaten as fried snacks when it is raining in the mountains, or as saag. We also mill the flour of phaphar to make sweet fritters called chunni. My monsoon memories are also incomplete without lingura or fiddlehead ferns that grow around water bodies and in moist soil. The fronds are cleaned and a simple subzi is prepared by stir-frying them. We also make achar. I have lacto-fermented lingura, and it turned out great.
PHAPHAR CHUNNI
Ingredients
6 tbsp phaphar (Himalayan tartary buckwheat) flour*
3-4 tsp sugar
Water
Bhangjeera (shiso/perilla) leaves**
Neutral oil for frying
Method
Sift the flour. Add sugar and water to make a thick batter. Add water in parts to achieve a batter consistency similar to a pancake batter.
Whisk gently and air the batter by raising and lowering your spoon in tender, quick motions. Leave the batter aside for 20-30 minutes.
Wash your leaves and pat them dry. Heat oil in a kadhai.
Softly coat the leaves in the batter. We want the chunni to be crispy, so avoid piling on too thick a coating. Then drop the battered leaves in the hot oil. Drop 3-4 or more leaves together, and wait till one side is done. Stirring them too much can make them oily.
Flip them to get the other side done, and then take them out on a bowl/plate laid with paper towels.
Best enjoyed on a rainy day with some hot chai made with fresh ginger and ground pepper.
*You could also use kuttu (common buckwheat) flour.
**Substitute the bhangjeera leaves with any monsoon leafy greens (gourd/ajwain leaves) available where you live.
ABHISHEK JOSHI
CHEF & CO-FOUNDER, WE IDLIWALE/WE IDLIWALE BARROOM, PUNE
Shevala or dragon stalk yam is something that I immensely love and have grown up eating in Kalyan, Maharashtra. It's an ingredient that has a very short window, and is available for a maximum of three weeks. As a kid, it was the only vegetable that got me excited because it'd be cooked with prawns or meat. Since my father is Maharashtrian Brahmin, we didn't really cook non-vegetarian food at home, although eventually we did as I grew up. My mother, on the other hand, belongs to the Sonar community, which bears close resemblance to the Pathare Prabhus when it comes to the cuisine. She prepares shevala in two ways— with karandi, or tiny prawns in a coconut milk-based curry, and with mutton keema. I always fail to describe the exact flavour of the dish, but my memories of the whole sequence of procuring shevala from the markets, and the family sitting together to clean and then cook it, evokes strong emotions.
DEEPIKA SETHI
CO-FOUNDER, BRIGHT HOSPITALITY, DELHI
Delhi's monsoon doesn't always get the love it deserves—but for me, it's always been special. I grew up in Patel Nagar, and at my parent's quintessential Punjabi home, the first showers were always welcomed with puas—sweet, fried delights that instantly made the house smell of celebration. But my personal favourite was a little less traditional—deep-fried bread with a generous spoonful of baked beans on top. Not something you'd find in a recipe book, but woven tightly into our family's rainy-day rituals. Of course, there were always pakodas of every kind, but nothing would beat bread pakodas, served with hot and sweet sauce. At Ikk Panjab chain of restaurants, which celebrates the spirit of homes from pre-Partition Punjab, we serve Jalandhari dal pakodas, which are perfectly synced with the spirit of the monsoon.
JALANDHARI DAL PAKODE
Ingredients
1 cup green moong dal (chilka)
One-fourth cup gram flour
Half tsp cumin seeds
1 tsp red chilli powder
Half teaspoon yellow chilli powder
1 tbsp chopped coriander leaves
1 tbsp sliced onion
1-2 green chillies, finely chopped
Salt to taste
Water (for soaking and grinding)
Oil for deep frying
Method
Rinse the dal well and soak for about 2-3 hours. Drain and grind coarsely in a blender with minimal water. The consistency should be thick, not smooth. Transfer the ground dal to a mixing bowl. Add cumin seeds, yellow and red chilli powders, green chilies, coriander leaves, sliced onions and salt. Mix well. Heat enough oil in a deep pan over medium heat. Take small portions of the batter and drop them into the hot oil. Fry in batches, without overcrowding the pan. The pakodas should be golden and crispy.
ROHIT KASUGANTI
CEO & FOUNDER, TSK FOOD WORKS, HYDERABAD
As a small boy, I'd spend the whole day in the fields, walking barefoot, hands muddy, chasing that mix of freedom and fatigue that only village life gives you during the rains. One ingredient I associate with it is corn, and it came from our farms in Yellapur in Warangal district in Telangana. In the evening, ammamma, my grandmother, would have the coals burning to roast the fresh cobs. She'd also make makka garelu, or crispy corn fritters. I remember eating 15 -20 of them at one go. We've brought these memories into the Terrāi kitchen, where the fritters are fried just like my grandmother's, and paired with either a drizzle of spiced milk reduction or a side of naatu kodi shorwa, a peppery country chicken curry that nods to those rainy evenings in Yellapur.
MAKKA GARELU
Ingredients
2 cups fresh corn kernels
2 green chillies, finely chopped
1 tsp ginger, grated
8-10 curry leaves, chopped
1 tsp cumin seeds
2 -3 tbsp rice flour (for binding)
Salt
Oil
Method
Coarsely grind the corn kernels in a mixie, just a few pulses. Do not make it into a fine paste.
Combine the crushed corn with green chillies, ginger, curry leaves, cumin, salt, and rice flour. If the mix is too loose, add a little more rice flour to bind. The mixture should hold shape when patted.
Wet your hands or take a banana leaf. Take a lemon-sized portion of the batter, flatten it gently into a disc (roughly 2 inches wide, half-inch thick), and poke a tiny hole in the centre, this helps it cook evenly, like a doughnut.
Heat oil. Once hot (test with a small drop, it should sizzle), gently slide in the garelu. Fry in batches on medium flame until crisp and golden on both sides.
Drain on paper towels. Enjoy them hot.
SAEE KORANNE-KHANDEKAR
COOKBOOK AUTHOR & CULINARY CONSULTANT, MUMBAI
I look forward to the monsoon because it brings to us a small window to enjoy stone fruit. People on the west coast start mourning the end of mango season, but there is such a plethora of opportunities with stone fruit, I wish people would see it. As children, my brother and I were perpetually biting into vibrant pink-purple Indian plums, their juices running to our elbows. Peaches are another Achilles heel. I enjoy them on their own, grilled and added to salads, or baked in desserts. Apricots get made into my annual jam as do plums (I also make a sweet and savoury chutney with plums and a panchphoron tempering). And I enjoy eating cherries and lychees as snacks. I wonder if, more often than not, we look at fruit from a blinkered lens, and tend not to experiment with their savoury avatars—fresh, fully ripe apricots work beautifully with mutton in a spiced curry, semi-ripe apricots and walnuts are ground to a spicy chutney with bright chilies in Uttarakhand, and so on. Since I am particularly partial to the sweet-sour-hot flavour profile, these fruits excite me a fair bit.
APRICOT ALMOND CAKE
Ingredients
4 eggs at room temperature
Three-fourth cup deseeded and quartered fresh apricots
120g plain flour (maida)
80g ground whole almonds
1 tsp baking powder
Grated zest of one lime or half an orange
100g ricotta at room temperature (or one-fourth cup full fat paneer)
80g butter at room temperature
200g castor sugar
Half tsp pure vanilla paste or 1 tsp pure vanilla extract
One-fourth cup almond flakes
Icing sugar for dusting
Method
Sieve the plain flour into a mixing bowl. To this, add the ground almonds, baking powder, and lime zest. Whisk to combine and set aside.
In a stand mixer or blender, place the butter, ricotta and castor sugar, and beat until pale. Add the eggs and beat well; don't worry if the mixture looks curdled, it will come together.
Add the vanilla and beat again to combine. If using a stand mixer, spoon in the flour mix a little at a time and beat on low speed. If using a blender, add the egg mix to the bowl of the flour mix and fold slowly.
Pour into a greased and lined tin (I use an 8-inch round tin) and top with apricots and flaked almonds.
Bake in a preheated oven at 170 degrees Celsius on the middle rack for 1 hour or until a skewer inserted in the centre comes out clean.
Invert on to a serving dish and dust with icing sugar.
Serve warm or at room temperature with tea/coffee or as a dessert with vanilla ice cream.
GAYTRI BHATIA
FOUNDER, VRINDAVAN FARM, PALGHAR, MAHARASHTRA
The word 'foraged" carries a certain romantic notion with it. Maybe it evokes a link to our hunter-gatherer roots. For forest-dwelling communities in and around Palghar (that the Vrindavan Farm works with), this is not an imagined scenario—even now, foraging is a way of living. A little over a month into the monsoon, we're standing in ankle-deep water, feet planted on mushy soil, unearthing seedlings of rice. We glimpse a shiny reddish-black back in the waters, before a creature makes a series of quick side-scurries. Excited chatter ensues. In seconds it has been decided which home, among those present, would cook crab that night, and the hunt begins. A couple of teak leaves are twined into a bucket, which is quickly filled with crabs.
Through years of working with the masters of the forest, I have come to understand the deeply-rooted and unspoken principles of foraging. Each field is only visited once by the humans during the time of transplant. The crabs caught during this single event turn into a meal. Mature crabs have voracious appetites. They tend to chomp down on the rice grasses that populate the field. The harvest of crabs brings balance—allowing time for the rice to grow and be useful to man, while leaving enough crab to ensure continuity in the ecosystem. The principles of sustainable harvests and balance in nature have been woven within the fabric of foraging since antiquity by community elders. We need deep lenses that go beyond our immediate desire for an offbeat meal as we approach the forests for food.
Arriving during early monsoon in our forests is Dina, or Leea macrophylla. It is a perennial typically seen in the understory of secondary forests or man-made meadows. The stalks are harvested while tender, leaving the tuberous roots in place for the subsequent monsoon. The thread-like strains are peeled off the stalks before cooking.
WILD DINA
Ingredients
A few stalks of Dina
Groundnut oil
Mango vinegar
Finely chopped garlic
Mango hot sauce
Salt and pepper to taste
Method
Warm the oil and sauté the garlic until brown. Chop the prepared Dina into bite-sized pieces and add to the pan. Sauté for a few moments until its colour changes, then cover and steam.
Drizzle some home-made vinegar and groundnut oil, and season with salt and pepper. If you're a fan of heat, drizzle in some aged mango hot sauce. Dina pairs well with native red rice mahadi.
Compiled by Rituparna Roy, Avantika Bhuyan and Shrabonti Bagchi