I know now that if by chance I will end up living in India for the rest of my life, I can find some happiness no matter what. That’s because I found an oven and a bakery that houses it. Today I went for a short field trip to Krishna Bakery in Averi, a small town outside of Palampur and on the way to Paprola, where the Ayurvedic College is located. Today’s excursion had little to do with my work here; it was more to satisfy my own curiosity. I knew that there are bakeries around here, and I wanted to see how one works. Luckily, Atul told me that he knew the owner of one and that I could come spend a few hours there. To say I was looking forward to it is an understatement.
The best part about the whole day was the moment that I walked into the premises of the bakery. A familiar smell hit me right in the face, one to which I had grown accustomed last semester when I worked at MSU’s bakery on campus: yeast. A lot of it. Some people say that there’s nothing like the smell of baking a loaf of bread in your house. I disagree. That smell is easily rivaled by the scent produced by baking about a hundred loaves of bread at a time. There’s nothing like it. It’s an overwhelming smell of delicious bread fermentation that you can’t get anywhere else but at a commercial bakery, and as soon as it found its way into my nostrils, I knew that I was going to have a good day.
Krishna Bakery is owned and operated by a Mr. Ajay Sood, who has no formal training but 12 years of experience. He speaks pretty good English and runs an even better operation. It’s quite small by American standards, with only 4 employees on the payroll, but it’s just the right size for a small place like Palampur. Mr. Sood’s bakery was a literal smash-up of east and west, a perfect example of globalization. I have mentioned before that North Indian cuisine requires very little baking and hasn’t really needed ovens for the past 5000 years, so any bakery in India, by its very existence, is a tribute to globalization. It’s a place where Western practices and methods are employed by Indian bakers with an Indian sense of jugard, which means “to manage.” There was plenty of Western equipment that I am used to: baking tins, loaf pans, an industrial stand mixer, large rolling pins, and last but not least, an industrial oven that I immediately fell in love with. Yet at the same time, the employees make do without some things that I consider necessary for commercial baking. The best example was when Mr. Sood was frosting and decorating a simple birthday cake. In place of the standard baker’s piping bag, he rolled up a piece of newspaper into a cone, cut off the tip and filled it with colored frosting. Awesome! No, it’s not the most hygienic of piping bags, but it certainly is the coolest I’ve ever seen.
This is also the first food operation I’ve seen where necessary waste is okay and acceptable. Standard operating procedure in India is to respect the food, but when you want to frost a cake nicely, you have to cut off the edges to make them nice and smooth. I was afraid that Mr. Sood would go the Indian route when frosting the cake, but my fears were needless, He trimmed the sides. Good for him!
More examples of globalization could be seen in the use of bakery margarine, shortening, and specialty baking tools. More examples of Indian flair could be seen in tin bake ware instead of aluminum or stainless steel, eggless cake mixes to satisfy the vegetarian population in the area, and multiple recipes that were made without weighing ingredients. This place was a great exploration and a wonderful visit, but even I didn’t expect to see such a good example of the effects of globalization. Everything about this place, the fact that it provides foreign-inspired baked goods, is a foreign influence, but it still manages to be very successful in the face of picky, inflexible Indian taste buds. I was very impressed by the whole operation, and even more impressed that Mr. Sood started the business 12 years ago with no experience and has managed to be very successful, despite all odds. What are the chances?
Just 20 minutes after my arrival, Mr. Sood asked me if I would like to bake anything to teach him a new recipe. Well, I had gotten so accustomed to not being able to use an oven that I was at a loss for ideas, until he mentioned trying a brownie recipe the previous week with no success. Luckily, the brownie doctor was in the house, and I just so happened to have a recipe with me that I tried at KLB a couple of times. Those times, making them using shoddy equipment and a lousy oven was a test of my patience and ingenuity. But this time, the brownies came together like a dream. No hesitation, no complications, because every ingredient was already on hand and there was more than enough specialized baking equipment to keep me happy for awhile. Baking brownies today was just like baking at home. It took less than 10 minutes to put together the batter and get it in the oven. Doing the same thing at KLB takes at least three times as long.
I was a little sad to have to go, but Mr. Sood assured me that I could come back any time during work hours to use his oven. Maybe I’ll try an American-style cake next time. It’d sure be an improvement over the tasteless faux-cakes that I’ve had here so far.
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