Asian Bread Class with Kathija Hashim

Goya, together with Kathija Hashim, held the first in a series of bread classes on Saturday, Feb 15th, 2020 at the Bangalore International Centre coffee shop. The workshop covered the Japanese style of bread-making, using the tangzhong technique that has been gaining popularity the world over, with lessons on 5 kinds of breads: Japanese milk bread (or Shopkupan), pizza, dinner rolls, whole wheat loaf, and cinnamon rolls. The lesson, as any good bread class should, included lots of snacking on warm bread and fresh-from-the-oven pizza.

The Japanese tangzhong 'secret ingredient' is a technique that improves hydration levels, keeps bread tender and moist with longer shelf life, and a very soft crumb. Kathija Hashim, our bread expert, is one half of the popular blog, The Malabar Tea Room. She is the co-author of The Family Table, a collection of recipes from the Mappila community of Kerala.

Kathija is also a deeply beloved and well-respected cook and baker within the food community. She has been teaching bread-making for several years, and began her journey as a self-taught baker, experimenting with different styles of breads. She is an engaging and passionate teacher, enthusiastic about imparting her skills to other home bakers.

More pictures of the event here.

Documenting Family Recipes & Publishing Your Cookbook

The Goya Journal leads a conversation with Ummi Abdullah, first lady of Mappila cuisine, and her granddaughter, Nazaneen, authors of the Mappila cookbook, A Kitchen Full of Stories; and Kathija Hashim and her daughter, Aysha Tanya, of The Malabar Tea Room, as they share their personal insights on the challenges and joys of creating a family cookbook.

Hosted at The Ritz-Carlton Bangalore, we met to discuss the documentation of family recipes, preservation of heirloom dishes and regional cuisine, learning from the experts over a spectacular high tea featuring Mappila specialities from the cookbooks.

More photographs of the event here.

Cookbook Club: Midsummer Mango Party

The summer edition of the Goya Cookbook Club featured mango dishes from all over the country (and world — hello Raw Mango Salad and Mango & Aubergine Soba Noodles!). We gathered in Third Wave Coffee Roasters one rainy evening for some excellent food, live music and fun conversation fuelled by mango kombucha. Our guests took home  goodie bags with products from our favourite Bangalore brands, Bare Necessities, Third Wave Coffee Roasters and Mubeena Shariff Chocolatier. 

Find more pictures from the event here. 

Workshop: The Goya Journal Guide to Good Food Writing

In collaboration with Pooja Dhingra's Studio Fifteen, Goya Media conducted a  workshop for amateur writers interested in food writing. The three-hour interactive workshop mapped a beginner's guide to creating quality content for media publications. Using resources within food journalism, participants break down and understand the elements of good writing, tools in digital media, techniques to develop a strong voice, and learn how to construct a story. It concludes with a peer-reviewed exercise in writing. 

Cookbook Club: Suriani Kitchen Edition

For this edition of the Goya Cookbook Club in collaboration with Penguin India, we chose Lathika George’s Suriani Kitchen, a wonderful, evocative account of the Suriani community from the vibrant state of Kerala. With more than 20 participants, this potluck held at the sprawling Nicobar store in the heart of Bengaluru featured more than 16 dishes from the book, ranging from the simple bitter gourd chips to more complex dishes like mango payasam and ari ada. An afternoon of fun, conversation and of course, heart-stoppingly delicious Suriani dishes, each participant received a copy of the cookbook to continue their exploration of the Suriani cuisine.

View more photos here.

Cookbook Club: Nostalgia Edition

This edition of the cookbook club featured Archana Pidathala’s Andhra cookbook, Five Morsels of Love, a wonderful tribute to her grandmother. The theme for this potluck in the park was to bring along a dish made from a recipe passed down from your grandmother — a fitting tribute to grandmothers everywhere, especially a certain one that inspired the gorgeous cookbook, Five Morsels of Love. 

See more photographs from the event here.

Cookbook Club: Enid Blyton's Midnight Feast Edition

Our midnight feast pyjama party was our end-of-the-year event, drawing inspiration from the midnight feasts that featured often in the much-loved Enid Blyton books. The feast that took place after dark featured favourites like shortbread, scones, pigs in blankets, jelly and pot pies. Socialising in pyjamas, we discovered, has its own charm! 

See more photographs from the party here. 

Potluck in the Park

For Goya's first Cookbook Club lunch, we chose a cookbook that is a culinary classic: Madhur Jaffrey’s Flavours of India - a book that should be part of every serious Indian cook's collection, not only for its extensive coverage of regional Indian cuisine, but also because it was Madhur Jaffrey who, in many ways, gave Indian cooking a global stage.

Madhur Jaffrey who moved to London to study drama and pursue a career in acting, found that she missed home-cooked food and asked her mother to send her recipes – she learnt to cook entirely through correspondence. Interestingly, Madhur Jaffrey almost never stepped into the kitchen prior to her time in London, and almost failed cooking at school. Her editor, Judith Jones, asserts that this is what made her an ideal cookbook writer – that she only learned to cook childhood comfort food as an adult. 

To supplement her income as an actor (Shakespeare Wallah is a Goya favourite!), Madhur Jaffrey began writing about food. This accidental foray into food writing was a serendipitous one. She was discovered by legendary editor Judith Jones (credited with introducing the world to Julia Child), and published her first cookbook to phenomenal success. The rest is culinary history. Her TV shows have become staple in the study of Indian cuisine. So it was only fitting that we begin with a Madhur Jaffrey cookbook.

The Goya Cookbook Club was initiated to reaffirm the importance of cookbooks in the digital age. While yes, you could probably find every recipe ever written through a gentle Google prompt, cookbooks play a much deeper role in the preservation of a community's culinary culture, documenting that vital part of the human experience – how we eat. 

The cookbook lunch was a potluck-picnic in Cubbon Park; everyone brought along a dish they cooked from the Flavours of India cookbook. The menu featured Goan style lamb chilli-fry, Chettinad pepper chicken, Punjabi chaanp masala (lamb chops), Kerala-style nadan khozi or country chicken curry, and Bengali malai prawn curry. We sipped on cold ginger-lemon squash and camped out on a blanket under the dappled shade of a bamboo grove. Among the sepia-toned fallen leaves of October, it felt very much like a Merchant-Ivory afternoon.