Deepa Chauhan celebrates Sindhi heritage with her comforting Patree Khichdi—a creamy, spiced lentil-rice dish best enjoyed with ghee, pickle, or papad.
Deepa Chauhan has come a long way from papad and pickle stories to being a custodian of preserving Sindhi culture and culinary creations. “Cooking is meditative,” she added when asked what cooking means to her in an interesting conversation with Outlook Traveller Eats. This journey of sustaining the age-old recipes from her Sindhi culture and unveiling those marvels in the Masterchef India kitchen has given her the voice and utmost pride in her Sindhi community.
Sindhis are people with a gregarious and cheerful nature who love to celebrate food lavishly. Deepa feels proud to speak for the entire community, which believes in her ideas and ways of crafting mouth-watering recipes that shed light on the culture that has been forgotten. “ It gave me a voice, an opportunity to do things I would not have been able to do if I were still in my home kitchen”, Deepa added when asked about her voyage of culinary expertise at Masterchef India. She is consulting 5-star restaurants and hosting Sindhi food festivals, but most importantly, she is giving the diaspora a reason to take pride in their heritage and the delicacies of Sindh.
Khichdi feels like ill people’s food, but Deepa Chauhan explains it as a blank canvas, “You can go and add whatever you feel like to enhance the taste, anything that makes you salivate, papad, pickle and ghee”, claimed Deepa. She remembers a market for pickles near her home back in Shikarpur. She used to visit the market with her mother and aunts, and they would make amla murabba and apple murabba that was bound to last and the perfect add-on with your classic khichdi.
Courtesy: Alka Keswani