Rooted in Community: A Chefs' Residency by Spudnik Farms

In an attempt to bridge the gap between farmers and chefs, Spudnik Farms has hosted its first Chefs’ Residency, Rooted in Community — that introduces 5 chefs to the wonderful world of tubers in Joida, Karnataka.

A collection of tubers from the region, amongst other ingredients

Chefs learning about the tubers in Deriye

Mudli stored in pits that are covered with ash

On a warm February evening, 5 chefs from Bengaluru boarded a train to Alnavar in Uttar Kannada district, in order to learn more about the native tubers — many of them are unknown to urban cooks — that play a significant part in the local cuisine. The Kunbis, an important agrarian tribe of Northern Karnataka, are indigenous inhabitants of the part of Western Ghats region adjacent to Goa. They have preserved many unique varieties of tuber crops over the centuries. However, they have been unable to fully realise the potential of these crops, for many reasons, including lack of proper marketing channels.

As a way to bridge this gap between farmer and consumer, Spudnik Farms has been working with members of the Kunbi tribe for the past 3 years. Their aim is to ‘create resilient agrifood systems which address health, environmental wellbeing and livelihoods through native/indigenous crops of India’. Spudnik Farms does this by working with farmers in Chikkaballapur, Nelamangala and Joida in the Western Ghats, and helping them build capacity, provide market linkages and adding value through processing of indigenous crops.

Bringing Indigenous Crops to Mainstream Markets

Spudnik Farms has been working with the farmers in Joida to bring these lesser-known indigenous crops into the mainstream by marketing fresh tubers and minimally processed products made from these tubers, to their customers in Bengaluru.

Yet, many of these tubers are still not widely known outside of the regions they are grown in. Bringing in chefs who can learn more about the tubers and its uses, directly from the home cooks who have been cooking with them for centuries, is an important step in having the tubers enter the larger culinary lexicon. Chefs are often the first to evangelise ingredients to the larger public, making them more popular, thereby creating a larger market for it.

The Chef Residency program by Spudnik Farms was created to facilitate precisely this — an exchange of knowledge and ideas around the biodiversity and culinary capabilities of tuber crops that grow in Joida in the Western Ghats. The residency program was divided into two parts — a field visit and culinary exchange in Joida, followed by a community meal, open to the public, cooked by the chefs as well as home cooks from Joida back in Bangalore.

In Joida, the chefs spent the morning cooking along the home cooks, learning the intricacies of cooking with these tubers, and put together a meal of 22 dishes. The menu featured bhakri, vadi, prawns with kasar alu, mudli rava fry, sanige, crabs amongst others. The feast was enjoyed by members of the local community.

Back in Bengaluru, the Joida cooks joined the chefs on their home turf this time, in a commercial kitchen, as the final part of the residency, the community meal. The Grand Tuber Luncheon fed over a 100 diners, and was served yela-oota style. It featured various tubers from Joida, including the mudli, kone, and kasar alu. Besides tubers, the menu also featured a coconut and kokum fish curry, vadi, bhakri and payasam. It gave diners a chance to explore a new (to them) ingredient in a meal with familiar elements. Through more residencies, Spudnik Farms hopes to bring chefs and farmers together to push the boundaries of understanding what sustainable and resilient food systems could be, leading, potentially, to a more climate-resistant future.