Manish Mehrotra has never been in the rat race to become a celebrity chef, but fame follows him, whether he’s on Instagram or at Indian Accent, because of his inventive cuisine. One of his many creations is the Jackfruit (kathal) Phulka Taco, which is my favourite because kathal is one of my favourite vegetables and I believe it can be put to many delicious uses, especially to those who may have recently turned vegetarian and miss biting into mutton. So uncanny are the textural similarities of both that the Bengalis call jackfruit, gachh patha, or ‘mutton that grows on trees’! I have also wondered why the world goes on and on about tacos, and invariably I conclude that it is because the world hasn’t had our phulkas.
Nothing in this world can match up to a piping hot phulka! Now, imagine my surprise when our domestic help produced four of them in ten minutes. Preparing these phulka tacos has been made that easy by Chef Mehrotra and the creators of Makery. com, the brother and sister duo of Rishiv and Tarika Khattar. Rishiv, incidentally, is the creator of Comorin, Gurgaon’s sensationally successful eatery, again steered by Chef Mehrotra; Tarika’s passion is filmmaking and she was last seen on the credit lines of Nandita Das’s Manto, where she was one of the assistant directors.
It was during Lockdown that the two developed the idea of Makery (https:// makery.in/), an online service that delivers pre-portioned meal kits for home cooks to be able to reproduce popular restaurant offerings in their personal kitchens. Indian Accent will re-open officially on 1 October, so Rishiv and Tarika wanted to create a little buzz by getting Chef Mehrotra’s fans try their hand at making the Jackfruit Phulka Tacos (Meal Kit: Rs 1,500; serves four) or its non-vegetarian variant with pulled pork (Meal Kit: Rs 2,000). More Indian Accent meal kits, assure the siblings, will be rolled out in the two months that the restaurant will be on Makery’s list.
What struck me about the meal kit was that it had every ingredient (from the coriander leaves and salli— Parsi-style deep-fried ‘potato hair’—to the ghee portioned out with precision. The accompanying recipe is simple to follow and easy to explain, which was why our help could pick it up with minimal coaching. The next time you invite people over, wow them with a Manish Mehrotra special.
