When Kashmiri kehwa sells out in Canada

Niche regional spices and foods are seeing a surge in popularity, both within India and abroad, in a movement spearheaded by a homesick diaspora, curious lockdown cooks and innovative entrepreneurs

It all began with a shelf. At Matamaal, a Delhi-based restaurant giving the capital a taste of Kashmiri Pandit cuisine, Hans Sadhu remembers one rack — “It used to be reserved for all our spices regularly brought over from Kashmir. It garnered a lot of attention, and diners would ask about it all the time,” says Hans, whose mother, chef Nalini Sadhu, founded and helms the restaurant.

The star of that shelf was — and continues to be — the vaer tiki masala, a dried cake of mixed spices shaped like a large doughnut. “Each family has its own slight variation of the spice mix, but the broad recipe includes mustard oil, coriander, Kashmiri chillies and whole spices. It is usually added right at the end: once a dish has been fully prepared, we break a slight pinch of spice off the cake, sprinkle it on top of the dish and cover it for a few minutes. It elevates the taste completely,” explains Hans.

Having made it to the Delhi-based kitchen of Matamaal, this vaer tiki now travels beyond Delhi to other parts of the country, as well as overseas to the US and Canada. It is one of the more popular items at Kanz & Muhul, a direct-to-customer brand launched by Hans in 2020 that ships everything from chillies to honey from Kashmir-based cultivators to the rest of the world. ““The brand was born purely out of our restaurant diners constantly asking about those spices on our shelf,” he says.

Kanz & Muhul is not alone. In recent years, the surging popularity of regional Indian fare has given way to a fervent curiosity about regional ingredients — Why does the Bihari flaxseed chutney taste distinctive? What is the use of mace — the outer covering of nutmegs popular in the Anamalais? What exactly goes into the Bengali spice mix panch phoron? Responding to this curiosity, and to the growing homesickness of regional food lovers who have relocated to other cities and countries, is a crop of young retail brands determined to educate the mainstream.

“Every household, including my own, has a mix of spices that is very proprietary to that community. Our target is the people who miss them.” says Pallavi Gupta, founder and CEO of Bengaluru-based Nutty Yogi that has been shipping regional flours, hand-made condiments, murabbas, spices and more across the country since 2018.

Spices form a small but steady portion of Nutty Yogi’s operations today. “We get about 500 to 1,000 spice orders a month,” says Pallavi, adding, “Most of our clients are based in metro cities.” According to her, the reason Nutty Yogi spices appeal to this clientele is simple — “Most of our recipes come from a collective group of mothers and grandmothers. When we did our research and asked them for their home recipes, most of them were happy to share. Some of them even make small batches for us to sell.”

So their Kolhapuri masalas and Bengali spice mixes are “all coarsely ground to order, in order to retain the aroma. We don’t aim for long shelf lives, and when we looked for these spice blends in retail stores, we found them ground too fine. So we decided to make up for it,” says Pallavi.