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.
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.
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.
— Rajesh VasaThe gap that became this site
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.
Cooking Indian food overseas
Living first in Auckland and now in Perth, the gap between what I was cooking and what I remembered eating became one of the most useful creative pressures on this site. The distance forced precision — when you cannot simply go to a good Indian restaurant and recalibrate, you have to understand deeply enough to recalibrate yourself. The ingredients are not the same. The tomatoes have a different acidity. The chillies are different varieties. The yogurt 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 — building guidance on ingredient substitutions, overseas equivalents and practical adaptations for cooking authentic Indian food with what is actually available where you live.
Vegetarian and vegan cooking
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. A dinner table where one person avoids dairy, another avoids eggs, and another simply wants something lighter — navigating that while still producing food worth eating is where a lot of real cooking knowledge gets built.
Indian cooking 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 vegan section of this site will not be an afterthought of dairy-free swaps. It will be built properly — the science of coconut milk replacing cream, cashew paste replacing yogurt, the way different fats carry spice aromatics differently. Recipes that are genuinely excellent in their own right, not compromised versions of something else.
This is an area where I can write with more personal authority than most. 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.
What has been built so far
What is coming
- A full Vegan Indian recipes section — built properly, not adapted from dairy recipes. The science of plant-based substitutions that actually work.
- A Jain cooking section — the creativity and science of cooking without onion, garlic and root vegetables. A small but fascinating culinary tradition.
- Vegan Indian cooking — India has a vast vegetarian tradition that translates naturally to vegan when done with understanding rather than substitution.
- Overseas adaptations — practical guidance on cooking authentic Indian food with the ingredients available in Australia, New Zealand, the UK and beyond.
- Sattvic cooking — the ancient Indian dietary philosophy of pure, calming food. A tradition that deserves serious, science-informed treatment.
- The Kitchen Table blog — published at least twice a month. Long reads on Indian food science, history, technique and the honest experience of cooking a complex cuisine far from home.
The longer ambition
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. Every recipe that has to be understood well enough to explain the science behind each step is a recipe understood well enough to cook properly. 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. Work through it at your own pace. Read the same page twice if you need to. There is no video to rewind.
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. Now living in Perth, Australia. Vegetarian cook with a growing passion for vegan Indian food. The restaurant is still a dream. The website is very much real. Questions, feedback and corrections are always welcome.