Perhaps the most surprising discovery we learn about Vasunthara Ramasamy is that she began cooking relatively late in life. Growing up, her culinary exploits featured mostly instant noodles, eggs and toast, a far cry from her claim to fame as Masterchef Singapore’s “Spice Queen”, where she regularly demonstrated her expertise on creating flavour through spices.
Although Vasun only began exploring South Indian cooking when she lived overseas as an adult, she has always had a deep appreciation for home cooks. Her childhood breakfast was not cornflakes but freshly made thosai or idli by her maternal grandmother, who cooked every meal from scratch. “The most valuable lesson my maternal grandmother taught me with her actions was to always cook with love and all your heart. My fondest memories all centre around our kitchen that had several traditional tools that are no longer in use in most homes in Singapore. My grandmother used a flat stone grinder, locally known as batu giling, which made superior wet masala pastes and chutneys. It was also in this kitchen where I learnt to sort out spices and where the family gathered yearly to make Deepavali treats.”
This approach informs the way Vasun cooks today, where she takes time to freshly grind spices, research recipes and culinary traditions, and pay homage to the flavours of her childhood. Come join us for an intimate, one-night only private dinner with Vasun on 5 October 2024, where you can taste her much raved about thosai (researched and perfected over 5 years!) alongside other delicious, meaningful favourites.
Indian food comes with these preconceived notions that it is very heavy, oily, spicy, red chilli forward. And there are reasons for it: it’s cultural and economical.
But my cooking is very different from South Indian food you get outside. In a nutshell, the food you get outside is food that feeds labour because the Indians who migrated to Singapore were all men at first, and they had to feed the masses with fast flavours. The mamak stalls you see are all of that movement.
It’s a little like your zi char stalls and high-end Chinese restaurants. It can be the same dish but cooked very differently.
Vasun has prepared an 11-dish menu for our one-night only dinner, which includes dishes that cannot be found in South Indian restaurants here.
I feel that the best flavours come from old-fashioned ways. If you want to modernise a dish, you have to understand how it’s made the old-fashioned way first.
Till today, I can close my eyes and still be transported right back to my childhood kitchen in Joo Chiat, seated at the dining table and patiently waiting for my grandmother to make my morning thosai. When I started making thosai, which is wild fermentation — meaning there are no starters to begin with — I realised my results were very inconsistent.
I think what people don't understand is traditional kitchens actually employ a lot of scientific techniques, they just never understood it as science. That’s why there are so many old wives’ tales surrounding the making of thosai! So I began to read papers on thosai and idli fermentation to understand how it works. In developing my thosai, I was pushing for a flavour I had when I was growing up, and I realised the longer you ferment, up to a certain point, the better the flavour. My thosai is different because I push the length of time it ferments, therefore the flavours are more nuanced and rounded. The whole process took me years to perfect.
Pictured: Stuffed Eggplant Biryani with Crispy Indian Vegan XO topping in Lanna Shell Sharing Dish with Bangkok Dinner Spoon in Brushed Gold. “I have always wanted to have an all vegetarian menu at Cutlery Optional as South Indian cuisine, in my personal opinion, has one of the best vegetarian cuisines in the world. So the eggplant biryani is the one of the main dishes for my vegetarian menu. To put my innovative spin on a traditional dish, I add a crispy topping made from lentils, dehydrated mushroom, spices etc. that amps up the umami and meaty textures of the eggplant. Sourcing the right type of eggplant and cooking it just right was a key part of perfecting this dish.”
I feel travel and food go hand in hand. My travels are always in search of food, but they’re not about ticking off a to-eat list. For example, I could be interested in how a spice is harvested or how a particular dish is made — when you go in search of that, the purpose may be for food, but you end up seeing a lot more because the place always informs the food. In places like rural India, they eat whatever they grow around them. They don’t buy things from far away, so you really taste the flavour of the region and the land.
I’ve always liked home-style food — the less equipment someone has, the more creative they are, and the more important the discipline of cooking becomes. Things like knowing the right temperature to cook at, knowing how to choose the right kind of ingredients — these things all directly influence the end result. It’s about humble ingredients cooked well.
I believe every culture’s food is delicious, and as a chef, I would never yuck anyone’s yum. When I travel, I aim to understand what people interpret as delicious. For example, in East Asian culture, texture — “QQ-ness” — is delicious. There is no taste to certain ingredients, for example jellyfish or black fungus, but it’s that crunch that is interpreted as delicious. If I say something is yuck, it means I’m judging it, and that means I cannot learn from it. I’m quite an adventurous eater — there are still things that revolt me a lot — but I will still try them. Ultimately, what I want to do is to educate my palate. If I only eat the same thing, my cooking will also be very boring.
“I sometimes brown my meat before adding it to the curry, which is not a traditional Indian cooking technique. It’s more a Western technique to add more flavour, just to punch it up a little bit.”Going to market with my grandma was a big experience as a child, although I hated it then. In the ‘80s, everything was out in the open. The chicken was slaughtered there, the fish was scaled there — you saw everything. And as a child, you don’t forget these things. The market, to me, was smelly and wet. Sanitation was so different.
But whenever I’m in the market now, I think about that. I think the market is a very important part of cooking in our culture, and learning to buy produce is an essential skill. It becomes intuitive when you learn how to spot the right colours and shapes. Market vendors are hard people to please — they always judge you because you’re younger, but I have learned so much from them.
Pictured: Keralan Beef Ularthiyathu in Gold Leaf Shell Presentation Bowl, part of the 11-dish menu Vasun has put together for her upcoming dinner for KRA. Even when I couldn’t reach the height of the stove, I would identify dishes by their smells. When I first taught myself how to cook, I would recreate flavours based on my memories of these foods — the smell, the taste, the colour.
I still eat with my nose first! For me, the aroma of food is more important than the aesthetics as fragrance notes tell you more about how the food would taste like than the visuals. In all regional Indian cooking, a lot of attention is paid to the aroma of a dish. To enhance the dining experience at Cutlery Optional, all my dishes are served warm or hot so that as I ladle the rice or gravy onto the diner’s plate, they’ll be able to inhale the top aroma notes from garam masala or oil tempering (thalippu/ tadka) that would not be obvious if the rice or dishes were served just slightly warm.
If I had to pick one ingredient from the upcoming menu to spotlight, it would be vadagam, which is a really interesting condiment. It’s a dry mixture of onion, garlic, and some spices that are usually added at the start of a curry. During the summer months in parts of South India, what they do is to make this mixture, then sun dry it, squeeze out the water, sun dry it again and repeat the process until it becomes a dehydrated, concentrated paste.
Vadagam is mostly unheard of in the west because it’s made at home and you don’t buy it in stores. Every home has its own version. With the humidity in Singapore of course we cannot just sun dry it, so I use my oven to create this. It’s a very labour-intensive process. I’m going to make a curry sauce using vadagam, which no Indian restaurant uses here, though it’s very much a part of Indian cooking.
Join us and Chef Vasanthura in person at the one-time only KRA Private Dining Food Tour on 5 October 2024. Seats are limited — get your tickets here.