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India Today
03-07-2025
- General
- India Today
Can AI make a difference to culinary creations?
(NOTE: This article was originally published in the India Today Spice issue dated June 2025)Once upon a stovetop, a chef learned to cook by kneeling at the altar of French technique. Sauces whispered secrets in mother tongues—bchamel, velout, hollandaise—each a step in the sacred choreography of cuisine. To be a 'real' chef meant to master the classics: the stiff whites of culinary school, the ballet of knife skills, the reverence for Escoffier. That was the gospel. That was the gold standard. That was then there was everything food of the Global South—fiery, fermented, fragrant—was boxed up and labeled 'ethnic.' A word that didn't just define origin, but diminished it. These were not cuisines, they were curiosities. Not disciplines, but deviations. Dosa was never a doctrine. Mole was a mystery. Kimchi, curry, injera, pho—delicious, but never 'refined.' These foods, these mother cuisines, motherships of flavor and tradition, were seen as spice-laden sideshows to the main act. Northern Europe had 'gastronomy.' The rest had 'ethnic food.' That schism—soaked in colonial echoes—became culinary canon. But the kitchen is a living thing. And now, the walls are AI. The algorithm doesn't play favorites—not unless we train it to. It doesn't arrive with bias or baggage. It doesn't know which cuisine sat at the head of the colonial table, which was served last, or which was never invited at all. On its own, AI might be cleaner than many mortal minds—minds weighed down by racism, sexism, ageism, xenophobia, and all the ghettoizing, gendered, gatekeeping ways we've ranked and reduced each other. But AI can also become as bigoted, as small-minded, as spiteful as the people who feed it. If we pour in prejudice, it will remix that too. That's the danger. Yet if we leave it open to learn from everywhere—freely, imaginatively—it just might become better than us at seeing food for what it really is: shared, shifting, this way, AI is a bridge—a blender of boundaries, a batter of traditions. It brings cuisines to curious cooks and opens palates that once paused at the unknown. It's beautiful. It's bold. It's not kid ourselves—it's not the whole food isn't just code. It's context. Recipes are not spreadsheets. They are stories. They carry the weight of history, the hush of grandmothers, the hands of labour, the breath of the land. You cannot truly taste Thai green curry without understanding the wet heat of Bangkok, the snap of morning markets, the silence before a monsoon. You cannot recreate rasam unless you've felt its comfort on a sick day, its sharpness on a hot afternoon, its pulse inside a Tamil can suggest. It can simulate. It can serve up patterns. But it cannot replicate presence. It cannot simulate soul. Here lies the peril—not in the machine, which is magnificent—but in our minds, if they go lazy. If we stop hungering. If we let curiosity calcify. The danger is not that technology will take over. The danger is that we'll let it—gladly, passively, eyes closed, hands idle, taste buds untrained. We will lose to technology only if we lose our will to cook is to commit. To commit is to care. The best chefs are not just technicians—they are travelers, tinkerers, thinkers. They sweat and stir, taste and tweak, question everything and absorb anything. They know that to understand a cuisine, you must immerse. You must walk the farms, drink the water, touch the spice, talk to the aunties, hear the hymns. You must know what grows when, what's cooked why, and how joy finds its way to the table in twenty thousand yes, bring on the bots. Use them. Train them. Let them spark ideas. But let us not forget that culinary alchemy still needs fire—real fire. The fire of feeling, of fatigue, of failure, of fierce raise AI in the kitchen, not as a savior, but as a sous-chef. Let it help us remember what we might've missed, what the world once ignored. Let it be a map, not the meal. A guide, not the guru. A prompt, not the cuisine is not just what you cook. It's how you live. It's memory, migration, meaning. And no machine, no matter how smart, can taste that for Saran is a Michelin awarded chef, author and to India Today Magazine- Ends
India Today
28-06-2025
- General
- India Today
The algorithm and the alchemy
Tnce upon a stovetop, a chef learned to cook by kneeling at the altar of French technique. Sauces whispered secrets in mother tongues—bchamel, velout, hollandaise—each a step in the sacred choreography of cuisine. To be a 'real' chef meant to master the classics: the stiff whites of culinary school, the ballet of knife skills, the reverence for Escoffier. That was the gospel. That was the gold standard. That was cuisine.
Daily Maverick
20-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Daily Maverick
Sauces & Saucemaking: When Generosity ought to trounce Parsimony
It's the badge above the grille of a fine old Studebaker. The funnel atop Cunard's Queen Mary as she glides regally into New York City. The final flourish of paint on a Van Gogh self-portrait before he signs it. It's the thing that makes a dish complete. It's the sauce. Years spent at culinary college, taking everything in. Hundreds of thousands of rand spent on setting up your restaurant. Hours and hours boiling down the chicken stock, and the veal stock. A lifetime of expertise devoted to making a beautiful sauce, using the stocks you made earlier, boiling it down with wine, and again with Cointreau, then reducing it with cream. And that, Chef – that little drizzle. That's all the sauce I get? For all their awards and expertise, some of the top chefs today are really mean with a sauce. I mean it in both senses. They make a mean sauce, in the sense of a killer sauce that'll have you swooning. For what? For more! Because despite all their laurels, way too many of our greatest chefs are really mean in the generosity department. A miserly little drizzle of sauce on your plate and the waiter's off to the next table. My habit is to beckon them back and ask for a small jug of it. A proud chef will not mind this; in fact, they'll bask in the warm glow of approval. Because there's nothing like a sauce to set a great chef apart from an also-ran. And they know it. Why, then, be so mean with a sauce? The answer they love to trot out is they don't want to 'mask' the other flavours. Well, thank you for your consideration, but I'll be the judge of that. And that's a very convenient argument, for the chef. Not so much for the diner. My classicist friend (his favourite sauce is Bordelaise) reminds me that chefs seem to have gone into this ungenerous mode, and become more and more minimalist, 'ever since (Paul) Bocuse moved away from the heavy classical sauces of Escoffier'. (Bordelaise is made with red wine, bone marrow, butter, shallots and Sauce Demi-Glace.) I might add: and ever since restaurateurs became more focused on the bottom line than they are on increasing the girth of your bottom. We accept that you have to make a fair profit, chef, but do not skimp on my sauce. Now that we've cleared that up, in my first GastroTurf column at the end of December, when most of you were busy elsewhere, I wrote about aromatics and my appreciation for the great Richard Olney and his classic, The French Menu Cookbook. It's not too late to go back and read my column, which you can do here. Olney, an American gourmand who lived in Paris, spends pages on sauces and things related to them, though no chapter is headed 'Sauces' as such. He ventures into sauce territory by first discussing wine in cooking, beginning with the firm admonition that 'a wine that is not good to drink is useless in the kitchen'. But he quickly changes course, adding, 'but because wines are transformed when boiled or simmered, their original character completely altered, it is foolish to waste a great wine in this content'. For a wine to be used in the making of a fine sauce, he recommends a robust, richly coloured young red or a lightly acidic young white. A cream sauce made with wine and/or other liquor such as brandy or liqueur can be truly spectacular, but wine can be used much more speedily and highly effectively simply by using it to deglaze a pan in which meat has been roasted, reduced with the scraping up of all the sticky bits at the bottom of the pan, and poured over the meat. You can whip one up in minutes or spend days making one. Fast or slow, hot or cold, or for that matter room temperature. You could spend a lifetime making a different sauce every day and yet have learnt to make only a fraction of all the possibilities in the world. The B échamel. The classic French tomato sauce. The V elouté, the Espagnole, the Hollandaise, these five being the French mother sauces. For a great chef, a sauce may be the final product of many processes. To make Marco Pierre White's Sauce Diable (recommended for offal), for instance, you'll need first to have made a good beef stock from scratch, and a good chicken stock, and then make a Diable reduction, which involves reducing white wine and white wine vinegar with peppercorns, thyme, bay leaves and shallots, which is then rested and strained, and only then start to make the Sauce Diable. This requires caramelising chicken winglets in olive oil, cooking them further with shallots and garlic, adding mushrooms, thyme and bay and cooking more, adding peppercorns and the Diable reduction, simmering and then adding the two stocks, simmering for half an hour and passing it through muslin. Then it's reduced again, to a coating consistency, and then you cook diced shallot in butter, dice more butter, and mix the last two into the reduced sauce. Et voila! – Sauce Diable. A Marco Pierre White book is a good thing to have, if you're serious about cooking, because he's all about the basics, just like Olney is. In my Canteen Cuisine book by MPW, you'll find the perfect beurre blanc and Hollandaise, the V elouté and the Béarnaise. There's also your Gribiche (cold sauce of boiled eggs, capers, gherkins, tarragon, parsley and olive oil), Sauternes (a cream sauce made with sweet white wine), and Sauce Aigre-Doux, a sweet-and-sour sauce of red wine and red wine vinegar sauce with garlic and shallots and made with veal stock, and recommended for tuna. So, the stock is the thing, for very many sauces. And a stock can be frozen, so on those odd occasions when I've gone mad and opened a restaurant (it takes a certain kind of madness), I would make stocks for many hours and keep them in the deep freezer. They can be made in large quantities and frozen in portions to suit your needs. Just remember to label them. If you wondered what a brown sauce was, Olney sets it out beautifully, as ever with a touch of wryness. 'Escoffier defines Sauce Demi-glace as an 'Espagnole brought to the extreme limit of perfection that it is susceptible of receiving, after a final cleansing (dépouillement)'. In today's kitchens, demi-glace and Espagnole are the same thing except that the latter (like 'brown sauce' or 'brown gravy'), thanks to a long history of careless or mendacious execution, has acquired a bad name, with the result that, no matter what the degree of perfection, a brown sauce is now most often called 'demi-glace' in English and French alike.' Odd word, mendacious, in that context. Note that Olney was writing this in the early Seventies. 'Whatever its name,' he continues, 'it continues to be attacked by some on the grounds that it makes everything taste alike. The only possible answer is that, obviously, it should not be used in everything.' Can't you just hear the sarcastic intonation in that, the cocked brow and flick of the hair. Those careless, lying Philistines have ruined the tradition of a perfectly good flour-based sauce. Not yet quite finished his takedown of a fiendish and naïve new direction in cooking, Olney detours to remark on what even then was a movement away from flour to thicken sauces. 'There is a movement afoot, fancied by protagonists to be purist, to cast flour from the kitchen – it has been pronounced an evil presence in all sauces.' He goes on to eviscerate the ensuing flourless sauce. 'The nouvelle demi-glace is a reduction of stock or braising juices that depends entirely on the liquid's natural gelatine for its body. The degree of reduction necessary to attain this body falls just short of that for a Sauce de Viande [meat glaze]; the intellectual purity of intent is betrayed by a suffocating concentration of taste and a gluey excess of gelatine.' Take that! What a delicious condemnation of flourless saucemaking. The brown sauce he refers to, if you're wondering, is that made by sprinkling flour on the meat and vegetables that have been browned in the pot, deglazed and covered with liquid, and simmered gently until braised, then 'strained and cleansed'. The early Seventies seems to have been a good time for books about sauces. Hamlyn's Guide to Sauces and Saucemaking, by Sonia Allison, was first published in 1970. Succinctly, she places sauces firmly in three categories. 'Almost every known sauce is a variation of a basic recipe and the great classics stem either from B échamel, Véloute or Supr ê me (the white group), from Espagnol or Spanish (the brown group) or from Hollandaise and Mayonnaise (the egg group).' Every classic is here, from Maitre d'Hotel (butter sauce for white fish) to Chaud-Froid which 'literally means hot-cold sauce; hot Béchamel sauce mixed with cold savoury jelly, such as aspic. When the sauce has cooled and thickened sufficiently to coat the back of a spoon, it is then used to coat cold buffet-type foods'. Today, though, the cold sauces on your common-or-garden hotel buffet are more likely to have come out of a bottle. And that's sad. Nothing in a bottle has been made with love. Nothing mass-produced is ever as good, even if nearly, as something made with care by an expert chef. Not even Mrs H.S Balls' original chutney. Maybe, in our own kitchens at home, we can make it a project to learn how to make a range of classic sauces, thereby becoming better cooks, better hosts (what's on our dinner party plates can only improve), and the better we get at this, the better we'll be able to tell the difference, when dining out, between a sauce that the chef clearly could have cared less about, and a great one. The one that will be drizzled on your plate while you glare at the waiter as he sashays to the next table, to pour the rest of your sauce onto someone else's plate. For too long (to borrow from Richard Olney) has there been careless or mendacious execution in the pouring of a sauce. So, be like Oliver Twist and repeat after me: 'Please, chef, may I have some more?' But add: '… of your wonderful sauce'. Butter them up. You'll get more. DM
Time Out
27-05-2025
- General
- Time Out
New York apparently isn't America's most diverse food city—here's what beat it
By now, you'd think New York had an iron grip on the title of most diverse food city in America. After all, where else can you grab halal cart chicken, Neapolitan pizza, Tibetan momos and Trinidadian doubles all before noon? But according to a new ranking from culinary school Escoffier, the crown belongs to San Francisco. Yep—Gotham got gobbled! The study analyzed restaurant data across U.S. cities with populations over 500,000, evaluating 46 cuisines and factoring in both population and restaurant density. The final results were crunched using the Shannon Diversity Index—math speak for 'how much global flavor can you access nearby.' San Francisco came out sizzling with a perfect 100 score. With about 2,700 restaurants packed into just 47 square miles, the Bay Area beauty serves up more culinary variety per capita and square foot than anywhere else in the country. Think dim sum in Richmond, Afghan fare in the Tenderloin and Michelin-starred sushi, all within walking distance (and often in fog). New York City, meanwhile, came in second with a still-impressive 92.58. We have more restaurants—around 7,000—but they're spread out across five boroughs and hundreds of neighborhoods. That gives us street cred, but fewer points for density and accessibility. Rounding out the top five were Seattle (91.69), Washington, D.C. (83.08) and Los Angeles (82.62). All saw high marks for cuisine variety and ease of access, especially compared to sprawling cities with more culinary monocultures. And speaking of culinary monotony: Detroit landed at the bottom of the list, with nearly two-thirds of its restaurants serving only American food. No shade to burgers and wings, but it's slim pickings if you're craving, say, jollof rice or laksa. Interestingly, California dominated the top ranks with six cities in the upper tier, reinforcing its rep as a flavor-forward state.
Time of India
12-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Time of India
How to Get Escoffier in Genshin Impact
Image via: HoYoverse Genshin Impact keeps improving its character creation with every update. Escoffier might be the most exciting new addition. She's a 5-star Cryo polearm user who excels at off-field support. Her passive abilities look like a dream come true. You don't want to skip this limited-time character. But how can you get her? And why should you care about her? Let's look at how to get Escoffier and why people say she's the best all-around support since the game started. A limited-time culinary delight Let's start with the basics: You can get Escoffier through special character banners. This means you won't find her in the Standard Banner or Beginner's Wish, your only chance is during the event banners when she's featured. COMPLETE ESCOFFIER GUIDE! Best Escoffier Build - Artifacts, Weapons & Teams | Genshin Impact Why all the buzz? Escoffier isn't just an average Cryo support. She works like a multi-purpose tool that can heal, boost allies, weaken enemies, and deliver solid Cryo damage from off the field. Imagine blending Fischl, Jean, and Shenhe into one refined character dressed as a chef. Cryo Damage from Afar: Her turret-style Skill stays active all the time. It dishes out constant Cryo damage making her ideal to freeze enemies in Freeze teams. Teamwide Healing: Her Burst does heavy damage while restoring a big chunk of health to the whole team. The healing grows stronger based on her ATK. Resistance Debuffing: One standout ability is her power to reduce Cryo and Hydro resistance, a feature tied to Anemo characters using Swirl reactions. Escoffier skips the tricky Elemental Mastery setups and debuffs enemies instead. Boosting the Team: By giving her the right build, her passive talents alongside chosen artifacts can enhance your team's overall damage. To sum it up, Escoffier has the potential to take on the job of two or even three other roles in a team, which makes her useful when tackling higher-level Spiral Abyss challenges where every team spot counts. How to build the perfect Escoffier Weapon : Pick polearms that give lots of Energy Recharge to keep her Burst active often. Favonius Lance works well as an early choice. Players willing to invest more might prefer weapons like Engulfing Lightning. Artifacts : Aim for a 4-piece Noblesse Oblige or Ocean-Hued Clam set. Look for Energy Recharge, ATK%, and either Healing Bonus or Crit stats as sub-priorities. Focus on upgrading her Elemental Skill and Burst first. Do not bother leveling up her Normal Attack talent. ESCOFFIER RAISED! What Can She Do? (Genshin Impact) Team compositions Escoffier works in Cryo Hydro core teams because her kit suits Freeze compositions. She pairs well with: Ayaka or Ganyu (Cryo main damage dealers) Xingqiu or Yelan (Hydro units to trigger Freeze) Kokomi or Mona (extra Hydro support or utility) Her ability to reduce resistance helps amplify the performance of characters who might have trouble dealing with tougher enemies. The COLD Truth about Escoffier! Showcase With Every DPS! (C0 Escoffier Build Guide) | Genshin Impact Is Escoffier worth pulling? If you want a character who provides consistent off-field Cryo damage, heals the team, weakens enemies' resistance, and offers versatile support, Escoffier is worth investing in. She combines several useful roles into one allowing players to build more offensive team strategies. This makes her more than just a fun character – she's a strategic advantage. Her cooking-inspired animations and distinct Fontaine charm also make her one of the most eye-catching additions to the game's growing lineup.
