Self-taught Tiruchi chef Vishnu Priya serves up the joy of healthy baking

This young entreprenuer is on a mission to make baked goods free of chemical additives without compromising on taste

Vishnu Priya Chellasamy carefully spoons sauteed paneer into oval wheat flour cases and turns them, as chefs do, into small masterpieces that are also called braided buns. There’s a meditative quality to the process, even though, the young mother of two admits, she’s running late for an order.

For four years now, Vishnu Priya has been experimenting and inspiring others, to discover the joy of baking without the usual suspects: refined flour (maida), white sugar, baking powder and soda and vegetable shortening or margarine.

Instead what you get will contain homemade flours of whole grains and sprouted millets, unrefined sweeteners from palm and sugarcane, cold pressed oils, farm-fresh butter and ghee. And out of deference to her customers, she also avoids using eggs.

Through her cloud kitchen Zhagaram Bakes functioning from her home in Tiruvanaikovil, Tiruchi, Vishnu Priya has created a menu that is more about staples like breads, buns and cookies than celebration cakes. She chose to name her enterprise after the letter ‘Zh’, of the Tamil alphabet, because of its uniqueness, that reflects on her own work.

“Though novelty cakes look lovely, they are not the healthiest of food choices. It is always better to pay attention to the ingredients before one cooks,” she says.

Vishnu Priya began to get interested in healthy baking after her children were born.

“When trying to buy commercially baked goods for my son and daughter, I realised that most of them were full of chemical additives. The huge demand often leads to bakeries using large amounts of improvers and flavour enhancers to pump up production. As a mother, I was obsessed with giving my children only the healthiest of ingredients. I also found that slow fermentation was key to avoid additives,” she says.