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Business News/ Mint-lounge / Features/  Hungry planet: Kiran Jethwa
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Hungry planet: Kiran Jethwa

Sustenance, not flavour, is at the heart of Kenyan food, but it's now sprinkled with immigrant influences, says the TV chef

Kiran Jethwa. Premium
Kiran Jethwa.

Born to an Indian father and an English mother, chef Kiran Jethwa’s early years were spent in Nairobi, a connection that pulled him back to Kenya years later—after stints at cities around the world—to start his own restaurant, Seven Seafood & Grill. His new television show, Tales From The Bush Larder (on Fox Life), gives him the opportunity to showcase Kenya to the world.

We caught up with the chef when he visited Bengaluru to promote the show. Edited excerpts from an interview:

Tell us about your first few food memories.

I was born and raised in Nairobi. People were always coming home to eat, and mealtimes were always a big event. I got interested in food when I was about five years old; I was the only boy in school who took up home economics. When I was about 12, we went on a school trip to the coast where the teachers bought a big fish, but didn’t know what to do with it. I remember digging a hole in the ground, making a fire with bamboo leaves, and cooking it.

What’s your all-time favourite food?

It’s something my mother used to make when I was a child: the bones of a goat’s leg cooked in dal, but the bones aren’t particularly meaty, so we’d eat the marrow. That dish, somewhat like a soup, would be eaten with rotis.

That sounds very Indian.

Kenya has had immigrants from all over the world—the Arabs traded here, the Indians worked here, the English were here—and therefore the local cuisine has traces of all these cuisines. The affluent families would have local citizens as domestic help, and they were taught to cook the food these families would eat. The help, in turn, would go home and try to recreate it.

In fact, if you walk around Nairobi, you will notice that a common breakfast is masala chai with a chapatti. But the chapatti here is more like a parotta. It’s a very common food—the locals just sprinkle some salt and chilli powder on it and have it with tea. And this is a very simple example of how flavours came into the country. You can now buy curry powder in shops; the people just make a regular stew, add the powder, and it becomes curry.

What about local food?

In Kenya, for years food was all about sustenance, not about flavour. So the food you get here is very rustic, very unrefined. Traditional Kenyan food is about starch and more starch, and some stewed greens, and occasionally stewed or cooked meat.

Ugali, a white cornmeal, is a staple, and people would supplement it with kale that is cooked down. Indulgence would be stewed beans, and some stewed meat (usually goat).

There are a few celebratory dishes, such as the irio, which is a mix of green peas, sweet corn and potatoes mashed together, or the mbaazi, beans and red chillies cooked in coconut cream. But the ugali more or less remains constant.

There are a few basic desserts as well; the mandazi, a plain sweetbread dough, cut like samosa, deep fried, and sprinkled with sugar, is quite popular. But there’s not much happening so far as desserts are concerned.

But don’t Kenyans love their meat?

Oh yes, they do! Any Kenyan feast is all about slaughtering a goat and cooking it.

Grilling is very popular; they use just red chilli and salt and roast it on an open fire. But it’s also quite expensive, so they can’t eat it as much as they’d like to.

Seafood is popular, but only in the coastal regions, and the supply chain is disorganized so it’s not easily accessible inland.

But you have a seafood restaurant; don’t you have problems sourcing ingredients?

Yes I do, all the time. We have to go to the coast and buy directly from the fishermen. There isn’t a system as such in place, so sometimes you get something, and the next day you may not. But after a few years, you figure out how to work things out.

You’re trying to showcase Kenya through your show. Tell us about that.

There’s a big misconception about Kenya—people think nothing grows here. But Kenya is abundant in agricultural produce. We have all sorts of vegetables growing here, and brilliant tea. There’s incredible seafood available here, as well as tropical fruits.

I’ve also been able to go and meet locals to highlight how, when you’re not very affluent, ingenuity can come really handy when it comes to cooking. And that’s also the reason I wanted to open a restaurant in my hometown, because I wanted to maximize the possibilities of the ingredients available in Kenya.

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Published: 14 Mar 2015, 12:58 AM IST
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