CHENNAI: Imagine this. You are in a foreign land, in a small apartment with not many vessels to cook in, and you are craving for a bowl of piping hot sambar saadam. What do you do? If you are someone like B Ramakrishnan, or Ramki as he is fondly called, you would resort to the One Pot One Shot (OPOS) cooking method.
After all, it was this craving for sambar while in Bahrain that led the masterchef of the OPOS methd on this journey, nearly 15 years ago. Since the success of his first book — OPOS Cookbook: 5 Minute Magic — in 2018, Ramki has upgraded his recipes for his recent launch The Complete OPOS Cookbook. Here, he introduces the concept of pressure baking, cold pressure deep fry and other new techniques.
Journey in the kitchen
For Ramakrishnan, cooking is a science and every recipe is a problem to be solved. “My journey into cooking is similar to what each one of us has gone through. Cooking is like drawing a freehand circle that is taught by your mom. How much ever you practise, you will not be able to draw as precisely as your mom can. And it takes a lot of experience and skill to draw a freehand circle. Traditional cooking is like that because there are a lot of variables involved.
Even if you follow every single step precisely, the results will be different for your mom and you. There are things that you have to learn by experience — when to add what ingredients, when it is cooked, etc. And this is why cookbooks do not do a good job of teaching cooking. This is why many of us who learn cooking from a cookbook give up on this art out of frustration. The result we get is nowhere near what is shown in the book,” he details. Ramki also had his tryst with cookbooks while in the Middle East.
And he was on the brink of giving up on cooking when he realised that the problem was not with him but with the cookbooks. “I am an engineer. If I have to design a car or a gear box, the solution is straightforward — take a manual and follow the instructions. They are precise, and no subjectivity involved. When I was trying to learn cooking from a cookbook, I found the instructions were contradictory, confusing, and very subjective.
Two books teach different ways to make sambar and each book claims theirs is the proper method. When I realised the problem is with the instructions in the cookbook, I was trying to figure out how cooking can be made into a science, and recipes into scientific experiment where there is no subjectivity. You don’t look for kai manam or kai pakkuvam in a scientific experiment, do you? So, I wanted to convert an art into science,” he elaborates.
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ntroducing OPOS
For everyone to get the same results while making a recipe, Ramki realised that the equipment had to be the same — like with your Chemistry experiments. “Rice is the perfect example. The steps to cook rice in Chennai or Himalayas is the same. It is not subjective. Even a child can follow that. My idea was to make all recipes similar to cooking rice.
But for cooking, the equipment, heat source, cooking conditions, and even geography matters. So I had to standardise the equipment,” he explains. And soon he and his team of OPOS chefs from all over the world, who discuss recipes virtually, decided on working with a two-litre pressure cooker to get to solve the problem in hand. This formidable team has proven that all kinds of Indian dishes — from Mysore pak to malai kofta can be cooked using the OPOS method.
Bettering the process
While choosing a pressure cooker leveled the playing field, there were some glitches reported by most chefs. “We found that a lot of vegetables turned mushy and colourless when cooked in a pressure cooker using OPOS method. It lost all its taste and texture. And people were willing to use a cooker to cook dal, pongal or potato where the texture and consistency is not important, but refused to use it for vegetables,” he shares. In their learning process, they discovered that to retain the colour, taste and texture of the vegetables, they need to cook it like a stir-fry that a Chinese master would make.
“We realised the key to doing that is to cut out all water and cook them on very high heat. This was the mantra that took us around 15 years to discover — high heat, low time, no water. You have to cook all the vegetables on very high heat for a very short time, in their own juices. When cooked so, the results were mindblowing,” he narrates. Hence, they began the deskilling process and came up with the pressure baker, which is a pressure cooker that is redesigned to work on very high heat, without water. “We designed this pressure baker and got Butterfly and Prestige to manufacture it according to our design specifications.
If you try using a normal pressure cooker to cook vegetables without water, a lot of mishaps can happen. We gave a presentation to companies and explained to them the difference between pressure cooking and what we are trying to do. It is not easy convincing companies that have been manufacturing pressure cooker for 50 years to ask them to change their design. Fortunately, we were able to convince them. With the equipment and these recipes, instead of drawing a freehand circle, we have given everyone a compass. Now, a perfect circle is even possible for a child. That is what OPOS has done to all recipes,” he says proudly. The pressure baker can handle any kind of recipe as this is just a cooking technique.
The taste test
When you cook anything beyond five minutes, everything is lost, he says. “In every single traditional recipe, vegetables get completely massacred. Even in restaurants, what you eat is dead carcasses of vegetables. And the only way to eat that is by covering it with loads of masala,” he explains. With the OPOS technique, you completely do away with the unwanted masalas. While the pressure baker is ideal to master the art of cooking using the OPOS technique, Ramki does have a solution to those who don’t own one. “For OPOS, standardisation is important.
So, to cook the basic recipes that we have given in the book, use a two or three-litre pressure cooker because all the vegetables need to cook within five minutes. For a small family, a two-litre cooker is enough; for a slightly larger family, use a three-litre one. But, if you are cooking for more people, do not use a bigger cooker, instead cook twice or use two pots,” he advises. In the two years since the last book was released, Ramki has been able to master the technique of caramelisation and invent a method called ‘cold pressure frying’, where you can deep fry without using a drop of oil.
“Deep frying or shallow frying is extremely injurious to health. Once the oil starts boiling it produces a lot of toxic chemicals. Even a simple thalipu you do at home creates a lot of smoke. This technique, done inside OPOS pressure cooker, eliminates oil smoke and oil breakdown. We didn’t know this in 2018. The techniques keep evolving. Three years down the line we, will need a completely different set of recipes,” he shares.
Cooking tales
Ramki’s house in Chennai does not have a kitchen. All he needs is a tabletop, a heat source and his pressure baker, and he is good to go. “I cook in my balcony, my living room or even out of the boot of my car! There is no smoke or pollution; I take the kitchen wherever I want,” he says. He has even taken it to high altitudes to cook for the Indian army in Akhnoor, on the India-Pakistan border in Jammu and Kashmir. “It was mind-numbingly cold. The squadron of soldiers was surprised to see me with a backpack and one cooker. When I said I am going to cook a feast for them they didn’t believe it. We managed to feed 40 soldiers in one hour.
They were shocked as they often live on frozen food. We showed them how easy it is to cook fresh food and they just loved it. One of my most prized possessions is a citation from the army and a medal. It was a heart-touching experience,” he reminisces. Now that he and his team have demystified and deskilled every single Indian cuisine, standardised the themes and recipes, the OPOS chefs are on a journey to take on global cuisines.
“We are working on a Singapore cookbook, Southeast Asian cookbook, Continental, Mediterranean, etc. People staying in those places are working on these recipes and coming up with a book. We also want to set up a chain of restaurants based on this concept — chef-less kitchen-less restaurants,” he signs off.Now wouldn’t that be something to watch out for? Book: The Complete OPOS Cookbook Publisher: HarperCollins India No. of pages: 226; Price: Rs 399