About Rajesh Vasa
Vegetarian cook, food science enthusiast, and founder of Indian Cooking Guide.
Vegetarian cook, food science enthusiast, and founder of Indian Cooking Guide.
This site exists because of a conversation I had with myself in a kitchen in Auckland about ten years ago, standing over a curry that had gone wrong for the third time in a row. Not the last time it would go wrong. But the time I finally decided to stop following instructions and start asking why.
I had started cooking not out of passion but out of necessity — a demanding job that needed somewhere to go at the end of the day. What I discovered was that cooking is one of very few activities that genuinely occupies every sense simultaneously. The smell of whole spices hitting hot oil. The sound of mustard seeds beginning to pop. The colour change of an onion moving through its stages. The resistance of dough. The first taste that tells you whether something is right or wrong. When all five senses are occupied, a busy mind has no spare capacity for anything else. Cooking became, quite literally, a form of therapy.
The problem was that I was terrible at it.
I was not failing because I lacked ability. I was failing because nobody was explaining why any of it worked.
There was a second motivation that grew alongside the first — one that anyone who has lived far from home will recognise. Living in Auckland, and later in Perth, I found myself missing the flavours I had grown up with. Not a vague nostalgia but a specific, precise absence — the exact char of a tandoor, the particular sourness of a proper tamarind chutney, the depth of a dal that had been cooking for hours. Trying to recreate those flavours with Australian or New Zealand ingredients, without fully understanding why Indian food tastes the way it does, was repeatedly frustrating. That frustration became a second engine behind everything on this site.
The ingredients are not the same overseas. The tomatoes have a different acidity. The chillies are different varieties. The yoghurt has a different fat content. The basmati at the supermarket is not the aged basmati that produces the elongated, separate grains that define great biryani. Nobody writes about this properly. Every recipe assumes you are cooking with the same ingredients available in an Indian kitchen. This site intends to address that gap directly.
"I was not failing because I lacked ability. I was failing because nobody was explaining why any of it worked."
Indian cooking has more content online than almost any other cuisine. Thousands of recipe videos, hundreds of channels, dozens of websites. The volume is not the problem. The problem is what the content actually teaches — which is almost always what to do, and almost never why. Why does the onion need twenty minutes? What actually happens inside it that makes ten minutes produce a fundamentally different result? Why does cream split in a curry? Why does biryani need to be sealed? What does "the oil separating" mean, and why is it the signal to move on?
Without the answers to these questions, you are not learning to cook — you are learning to follow a script. And the moment anything deviates from the script, you have no framework to recover. I spent years watching multiple videos of the same dish, looking for the clue that one presenter would let slip that explained what the others had skipped. Slowly, across many failed attempts and many hours, I pieced together the logic beneath the steps. That process took years. It should not have to.
The shift came when I stopped trying to follow recipes and started trying to understand them. When I learned that an onion cooked for twenty minutes has undergone a fundamentally different chemical process than one cooked for ten — not just more cooked, but chemically transformed. When I understood that cream splits for a specific, predictable reason — and therefore has a specific, predictable solution. Suddenly, cooking stopped being stressful. A dish that went wrong became a problem to understand rather than a failure to abandon. And the meals I produced began to taste like what I was aiming for — not by luck, but by design.
Indian Cooking Guide is a reference site for people who want to understand Indian cooking — not just follow it. It is built around the belief that knowing why something works makes you a better cook than any number of recipes ever could. The site has seven sections, each approaching Indian food from a different angle:
I cook vegetarian — and have done for as long as I can remember. Over the years, cooking for friends and family with different dietary preferences has pushed me toward vegan cooking too, and I have come to genuinely enjoy the creative challenge it presents. India has one of the richest vegetarian and vegan traditions in the world — thousands of years of plant-based cooking developed not as a trend but as a way of life. Dal, sabzi, rice, bread — the everyday food of hundreds of millions of people has always been entirely plant-based. This site intends to do that tradition justice.
The Jain cooking section of this site will be built carefully, with real expertise behind every page — not adapted from non-Jain recipes with the onion removed, but built from the ground up with the correct ingredients and the correct understanding of why the dish works without them.
The history and science content on this site is built from primary sources, peer-reviewed food history research, and documented culinary traditions wherever possible. Where academic sources are unavailable and the evidence is interpretive, this is noted. Indian food history is a field with many contested claims — this site tries to represent the weight of evidence rather than any single argument.
Indian food history is often told in one of two ways: as an unbroken ancient tradition stretching back thousands of years, or as a story of foreign influences that made Indian food what it is today. Both framings miss something important. The more accurate picture is of a cuisine that was always in conversation — with the Persian courts that gave it dum cooking, with the Portuguese ships that brought it chillies, with the Mughal emperors who layered rice with saffron and dried fruit, with the British railways that gave it a national platform. Each of these conversations changed Indian food. None of them replaced it. The result is the product of five thousand years of absorption, adaptation, and reinvention. That is the story this website tries to tell.
The honest answer to why this site exists in its current depth and scale is that it is groundwork. The long-term aspiration is to open a restaurant. Not soon — that is years away. But the process of understanding Indian cooking deeply enough to write about its science with authority is the same process of understanding it deeply enough to cook it at a level worth serving. Every page on this site is part of that process. The site and the ambition are not separate projects — they are the same project at different scales.
If any of this resonates — if you have stood in a kitchen frustrated by a dish that will not come together and wished someone would just explain it — this site was built for you.
Rajesh Vasa — Perth, Australia. Started cooking in Auckland, New Zealand as stress relief after demanding work days. Living overseas and missing the precise flavours of home became the second push — the one that turned a habit into an obsession. Vegetarian cook with a growing passion for vegan Indian food. The restaurant is still a dream. The website is very much real.
The best place to start is India Before Chillies — eight minutes that change how you see every Indian dish you have ever eaten. Or browse the full History Hub to choose your own starting point.