How many of you have had a roti (flat bread) made on a ‘Chulha’ (wood fire clay stove)?
Food cooked on a ‘chulha’ reminds one of the quintessential rural charms that come with desi Indian cooking from a bygone era. While on one hand, chulhas are still used extensively in some Indian villages still deprived of gas connections, they are also part of exquisite restaurant kitchens and road-side dhabas (food stalls) that promise the authentic smoky flavour that comes along when the food is cooked on a chulha.
Cooking on a wood fire is no easy task especially when there are many easier alternatives available for cooking. But one family in Sydney has kept the tradition alive. An expert in classical Indian dance and classical Hindustani music, Madhavi Mohindra has kept the art of cooking on a chulha alive, 10,000 km away from where it all began.
Source: Gaurav Vaishnava/ SBS Hindi
Till 1990, the food in my household was cooked on the wood fired clay stove. Whilst I enjoy every type of cuisine, the desire to eat the aromatic smoky tasting food cooked on a ‘chulha’ followed me to Australia, she tells SBS Hindi.
Source: Guarav Vaishnava / SBS Hindi
When I got married I did not know how to cook, but when I came to know that my husband is a foodie, I dived into the culinary world
She says building a chulha in Sydney was not an easy task. “But that heavenly smoky aroma fired my desire to get a chulha,” she says. She had made up her mind to have a traditional chulha but with a modern twist.
"I wanted a mobile chulha that could be locked away indoors when it rained and be brought out on a cool wintery night", she says. They failed at their first attempt. “The first one we built cracked when the clay dried up. We realized that to bind the clay stove well we needed cow dung, some hay and clay dug from deep below the surface,” she says.
Madhavi and her husband did the hard yakka to source all the raw materials.
Nothing was going to stop us. We went to the construction sites to gather clay which had been dug from deep below the surface. We went to countryside farms to gather cow dung.
Finally, they built their dream chulha.
“It was an amazing effort. Our chulha is probably the first of its kind to be built in Sydney,” Madhavi says, adding with a chuckle, “My husband Vikram had a big hand in our success in building the chulha.”
Source: Gaurav Vaishnava / SBS Hindi
Madhavi says cooking on a chulha takes a lot of patience.
“It requires a lot of patience and is very time-consuming. When selecting a bride in an arranged marriage for their son, villagers test a girl’s cooking on a Chulha, not necessarily to find out her culinary skills, but to test her patience. Running a household is a skill that needs a lot of patience,” Madhavi says.
While Madhvi cooks anything and everything on her chulha, she says, during winters she prefers cooking non-vegetarian food. “In winters, food cooked on my chulha holds that heavenly smoky flavour, for which people pay a lot of money in restaurants. We get it at home,” she says.
Watch the video:
(Video and editing: Gaurav Vaishnav)
Disclaimer: We’d like to point out that the segment was filmed during a safe (non-fire ban) day. The family does not use a chulha during the fire ban.
