Engineering discipline applied to cooking:
The keys to my cooking are my recipes which have evolved over a twenty five year period. By applying an engineering discipline to the process of incremental improvement, I documented the changes as is made from iteration to iteration of making a particular item. Most Indian cooks or chefs would vouch that this is highly unorthodox. Almost all cooking on a small or large scale is done by feeling and by precise recipes. In the early years, what used to drive me crazy was I would be making the same dish twice (by feel) and they would never taste the same. As a result, when we would invite someone and would cook some dishes, I would not know which version would show up that night. I started developing precise recipes to solve this problem. This was particularly true for someone in our shoes, who did not cook Indian meals every day, for our own daily consumption, but mostly cooking for special occasions such as parties or cooking for a community event. I wanted to have a system where I would cook something and it will taste exactly the same each time. This was the motivation and the impetus for developing precise recipes.
Finally - the reason for our Basu's Gourmet Indian Cuisine:
I take extraordinary pride in my family’s tradition of excellence in their culinary skill. I am also proud to have extended that skill in a way that was never part of my mother's or sister’s way of cooking, yet maintaining the excellence they had in their cooking none the less. Over the years, I had thought about opening a restaurant to channel my passion for food and cooking and the joy I derive by entertaining friends and family, but sighed away from the idea because there are many aspects of running a restaurant that simply does not appeal to me. Now I have figured out how to channel my passion for food, cooking, and most importantly our Bengali hospitality in entertaining our guests into being able to share all this with the whole world as a whole.
(to be continued)
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