why I quit my tech job to teach Indian cooking

because I'm sick of seeing curry powder in people's pantries

learn how to make Indian food without recipes

so you don’t have to order out and can cook for your friends.

it turns out cooking without recipes is an intense abs workout but will also break your right index finger

my journey lol

I’m currently teaching the class I wish I could have taken when I was first learning to cook, 10 years ago. I had just graduated from college and moved to New York, and I was so, so homesick for real Indian food. I was busy with my job and my friends, so I would have loved to just buy the food I craved, but it seemed like I couldn't: the stuff they sold at restaurants was so rich, creamy and meat-heavy. It was nothing like what I grew up eating with my family in India.

homesick for hari chutney

So I reluctantly began to cook. I tried everything: I followed YouTube videos, got on the phone with my grandma, visited my aunt who lives in Flushing, bought cookbooks, and took lessons. It was so frustrating. Everyone wanted to teach specific preparations, but I hated following recipes. More importantly, knowing a bunch of recipes didn't help when I was hungry on a random Tuesday and didn't have all the ingredients for any single dish. It wasn't fun, but I persisted because I longed for the foods I loved as a kid. For years I made the same few favorites over and over. I felt stuck.

Then I tried teaching my little sister to cook, and I had a breakthrough: I found myself explaining a small number of core concepts. I started thinking about Indian food in terms of these ideas instead of recipes. These ideas showed up in all the recipes, and I could assemble dishes out of them as if snapping together Lego blocks. The recipes I knew were like the instructions that come with Lego sets: helpful suggestions vetted by experts, but by no means the only valid way to put these ingredients together.

me, after growing the Mustache of Understanding

Armed with this discovery I started cooking improvisationally. I would go to the Fort Greene farmer's market, buy the best-looking vegetables and then cook them into yummy Indian food. Ingredients that my grandma had never heard of turned into subzi and dal and chutneys. I experienced joy and creativity in the kitchen. I felt free.

I remember an evening when I had a group of friends hanging out at my apartment. I hadn't planned on feeding them but people were getting hungry. I asked them what their dietary restrictions were and what level of spice they could handle. Then I opened my fridge, looked in my pantry and put together a meal with four dishes in about 45min. I was doing better on time than the local Indian place on Seamless ("Masala Grill")!

i beat the local Indian restaurants by more than just a fraction of a second. take that usain bolt!

I turned what I learned into a class, and taught it to people across a range of skill levels.

but not everyone lives in Brooklyn, and not everyone can take my class

Every night I cry myself to sleep thinking of all the desi college graduates who never cooked as kids and are now pining for aloo gobhi. Of course it would be best if they took a month off from work, flew to New York and took my class. But it is second-best for them to subscribe to my substack.

everything I figure out about Indian cooking will be posted here, for free

I’m trying to change how people think about and teach Indian cooking. I don’t have all the answers but I think I’ve found the right question: what are the core techniques, mental models and mother masalas for systematizing Indian food? In my class I teach the stuff I learned as I asked this question, and now I’m writing it all up and posting it here. There’s no paid tiers or anything like that. I don’t want your money, I want to change your mind!

“it depends greatly on the atmospheric pressure!”

I don’t know how often I’ll post. Probably a flurry at the beginning as I clean up and post the material I already have for class, and then more slowly as I learn new stuff and change my thinking.

plz argue with me!

I’m probably wrong. This whole project is probably misguided. But the trouble is I haven’t yet figured out exactly how I’m wrong. I need you to tell me, so I can stop being obsessed and go back to being a normal, boring guy doing software development middle-management at an automated trading firm.

subscribe to find out when I next run my class

and to hear my spicy hot takes about Indian cooking.

Oh also the title of this post is clickbait, sorry! I did quit my tech job and I do, now, teach Indian cooking, but this post doesn’t tell that story. Maybe later!