BENGALURU: It all started at 9,” says the celebrity Shazia Khan, who rose to fame after she became the first runner up in the cookery reality show Master Chef on Indian television.
Hailing from a joint family in Bengaluru, she enjoyed the bonding of her mother, grandmother and all the ladies in the kitchen. She says, “I was very passionate about cooking when I was a kid. I saw lot of bonding happening in the kitchen. That excited me a lot. We were in a joint family. I often found myself once back from school, with the ladies, in the kitchen. It started all there and kept growing more and more in me as a passion.”
But she never dreamt even in her wildest dreams that she would ever participate in MasterChef and become a chef. “It was meant to happen,” she says adding, “The journey since has been beautiful and very humbling. There’s lot of learning. When you work is your passion, you enjoy it even more. So, I am enjoying my work. I love doing workshops and sharing my knowledge. I also travel quite a bit.”
A Modern Indian cook, Shazia calls every ingredient unique. “Every ingredient is unique in its way. It has something to do with the flavours and textures. As a chef, it is a learning to play with new ingredients and create something new. If there is an ingredient, I find tough to work with, I work more on it and figure out recipes. For example, bitter gourd. Everybody feels it is tough to work with.
But as you try, it is actually fun to work to with it.”
She has made a couple of dishes with bitter gourd, but what is interesting is that bitter gourd can be combined with meat like mutton keema. She says people are usually scared to use it thinking that it will be bitter in taste. But there is a technique. She adds, “I learned the technique from my grandmother. You need to soak it in tamarind pulp to remove the whole bitterness and increase the sour agent, that you may find due to tomato or tamarind pulp from the recipe.”
She created a recipe called stuffed karelas after several trials and errors. She explains, “They are small stuffed karela cups. They are stuffed with keema, a morocco style mutton mince. Lot of people loved it. The karela adds whole crunch to the dish. The flavours and spices of morocco cuisine make it taste completely different. It doesn’t taste like the usual karelas.”
The chef Shazia Khan was recently in the city for a cookery workshop at Phoenix Marketcity.