FARMER CONNECT
The May sun beats down as chef Lokesh Swami walks through a spinach patch at the Chemon Estate in south Delhi. He is here to chat with the farmers to check if the leaves are young. In a few hours, a fresh batch of spinach and kale will travel 10 km to reach Nicocaara, a restaurant in Chanakyapuri.
The spinach will go into the making of the Baked Ricotta and Ricotta Gnocchi; the kale will sit in a nest of leafy salad next to the salmon. Nicocaara, co-partnered by entrepreneur Ambika Seth, is a restaurant specialising in seasonal cuisine that procures its veggies from Seth’s Chemon Estate farm, besides another farm in Nuh (Harana), 25 km away, and several other local suppliers, all of whom are on Swami and Seth’s Whatsapp contact-list.
“We plan our menu according to farmers’ alerts. It’s a two-way conversation really,” says the chef as we walk around the Chemon farm. “In August, we will start planning for our winter menu and the farmers will start getting the soil ready to grow the purple radishes, cabbages and carrots. They will be ready by October.”
And if they are not? Swami says the Caara philosophy is not to force the land to give more yield but to sustain a healthy food culture in its restaurants (there are three in Delhi) and the health of its fields.
Swami is a farm boy himself. A follower of Ayurveda, he maintains his own twoacre farm in west Delhi. Fruits and vegetables also “have skin, they breathe, if pumped with chemicals, they harm. This is why we change our menu frequently. Caara’s vegetables are grown completely chemical-free. Whatever the land has to offer in season, we accept”, he says. There
is a need to love even “imperfect vegetables”, says Seth who drops in by appointment at the restaurant. “There is also no chance of getting cauliflower as soup or as a side in this season. But what you get is sweet potato,” she adds. Food in summer is also being made interesting with lashes of Caara’s home-made sauces such as the basil pesto, which is used liberally in pastas and salads or on sourdough rye bread.
“The bottled sauces have no preservatives. You need to finish up within a week,” the chef advises a guest who wants to buy a pesto bottle “to keep”.
The kitchen is, in fact, Swami’s lab for trial and error with various ingredients, and to try out different pairings. Recently, he infused hummus with chironji seeds. A summer twist was also given to the traditional Mediterranean mozzarella and tomato salad by using an Indian burratta (cow milk cheese) with a mango salsa. He does not consider this changing the grammar of the dish. “We are all for upping the local content of our food. That’s our everyday practice,” he says.
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PARAMITA GHOSH