From Curing Meats To Cookies: This Year's Food Nerd Labs Lineup

“THE F&B INDUSTRY is quite fragmented, stakeholders are pitted against one another, people who work within and around this industry meet each other in competitive settings like award ceremonies alone,” explains Anisha Oommen, founder & editorial director of Goya Journal, an award-winning food and culture publication. Oommen, along with Elizabeth Yorke and Anusha Murthy, the co-founders of Edible Issues, a food & design collective, decided to stir the pot and throw a party. In 2021, they – Goya Journal & Edible Issues – hosted their first Food Nerd Party, “a place for people from the F&B Industry to come together and just hang out for an evening without any agenda,” Oommen says. 

But over the two years, they hosted this annual party for fellow food nerds, Oommen observes, “that interesting collaborations and conversations began to be sparked; it seemed to work as a forum for the exchange of ideas”. Oommen, Yorke and Murthy wondered “how could they build out – this energy – into a platform with more structure”. In 2023, Goya Journal and Edible Issues brought on board the branding and marketing expertise of Rohita Madappa of Two Tigers & Co. to launch the first Food Nerd Festival in its biennial format. Building on the idea of bringing fun back into the F&B space, Madappa has worked to make the festival “a space that brings value to the community, stakeholders and brands in this industry,” she says. Madappa has also been instrumental in “bringing in experts from outside of the F&B industry to speak to their experiences in business or brand-building, which prevents knowledge from being in silos”. 

At the first edition of the festival, under categories like ‘Food Nerd Playground’, they hosted panels that offered “direct access to industry insiders – it’s like getting an MBA in the food space”; in the ‘Food Nerd Labs’ they had “culinary experts lead hands-on workshops” and the ‘Food Nerd Market’ which showcased artisanal producers. While the festival's full course will be served next year in Bangalore, during the in-between years, these organisers are offering their most popular sampling: the Food Nerd Labs. And they’re taking it to two cities – Bangalore and Mumbai – this time.

Using the familiar, culinary starting points of Salt, Fat, Acid and Heat, these Food Nerd Labs allow participants to get their hands dirty. While home chefs, industry workers and consumers might have access to workshops to brush up on their skills, “these labs have been uniquely designed to allow for food geeks to go a step ahead and learn layered, nuanced techniques with experts,” says Anusha Murthy of Edible Issues. “Like how one can alter the heat in a pan to bring out different flavours or textures of an ingredient. If it’s fermentation while there’s a lot of talk around kombucha, our workshop looks at shrubs, which is a slightly advanced technique still very much accessible to anyone from a home chef to someone in the F&B industry,” Murthy adds. 

This year’s Food Nerd Labs will have a repeat performance by Chef Gautam Krishnankutty and charcutier Bala of Salty Cured Pigs leading the ‘Salt’ lab. “Chef Gautam and charcutier Bala will demonstrate the role of salt in the preservation and curing of meats as well as Indian meat pickling techniques from across the country. Chef Heena Punwani of Mumbai’s Maska Bakery will be tackling the ‘Fat’ lab. She will unlock the science of using different fat mediums – butter, ghee, coconut and olive oils – through a cookie-making session. At the ‘Acid’ lab, Chef Payal Shah of Kobo Fermentary will speak on the history and usage of Indian vinegar as well as demonstrate how to make a shrub-based drink. And finally, in the ‘Heat’ lab, Bandra Born’s Chef Gresham Fernandes will talk about different heat sources and their role in making food more delicious from jammy eggs to dehydrated jerky,” Oommen summarises this year’s Food Nerd Lab offerings.

“When you go to culinary school, you are taught French cooking but rarely are these courses designed for the students to understand Indian flavours, or very rarely does one have the opportunity to marry our Indian flavours and produce with Western culinary techniques” says Murthy. And so for these organisers, this bridging of techniques and knowledge systems to “speak to Indian ingredients and tastes is one of the important focuses” of the Food Nerd Labs, Murthy underscores. Oommen echoes these values of the Food Nerd Festival and adds, “From our experience, last year, we observed that participants found a lot of value in the labs, and people had flown in Bhopal, Kolkata and Delhi to take part in them. So, we think running the labs in the gap year of the Food Nerd Festival would create more access to the limited seats since our labs offer a hands-on session of direct interaction with culinary experts. But also, it’s a fun way for the festival to travel.”

The Food Nerd Labs take place in Bangalore on November 16 and in Mumbai on November 23. For details, log on here.