If she hadn’t become a chef, Aarthi Sampath simply tells me she would have been an actor, as my friend and I sat eating fried eggplant chaat and ghost chicken at Junoon New York, where she is chef de cuisine.
“Since I was a kid I did a lot of dancing and theatre. And my parents were, like, ‘this is not a career’,” Sampath tells us. But her dreams of being in front of the camera had just been fulfilled as she had won Food Network’s cooking competition Chopped only days ago.
“Growing up I felt discouraged because in the Indian film industry — TV also for that matter — there are no dark skinned women, or they are trying to be less dark. So you can imagine at that tender age, with all this discouragement and seeing how dark skinned, fairly plum, women were treated, you start feeling you can’t do it,” she says.
Maybe that was the blessing in disguise that turned her to cooking and she hopes to integrate the two in the future via a culinary show of her own.
Sampath is, however, not the first chef from the Michelin-starred restaurant whose kitchen is helmed by celebrity masterchef Vikas Khanna, to win Chopped, informs restaurant owner Rakesh Bhardwaj.
“She’s our first female chef to win Chopped. Walter D’Rozario, who was also chef de cuisine, and sous chef Austin Torsiello, have also won the competition earlier,” Bhardwaj tells me. “I don’t think you can practise for something like this because you don’t know what will be in the basket. It all depends on the knowledge and experience that you gather in the kitchen over a period of time”.
If you’ve watched the show, you’d know the mystery lies not just in the box of ingredients but also in how the participating chefs would field the googlies that it throws. For Sampath it came in the form of escargot (snails) — and that too in the very first round.
“It took me right back to Mumbai during rains, to these creepy crawlies that were all over our garden. For a minute I was just lost. Everyone around me was running to the pantry before I could gauge what I was going to do with them,” Sampath says, laughing. “One thing I had decided before going on the show, however, was that whatever I cook it will be Indian-inspired because I wanted to showcase that our cuisine can also be plated beautifully. Chopped has rarely had winners who are Asian. I wanted to break that barrier”.
Sampath prepared escargot in a Kerala style pepper-garlic sauce with cilantro and lime. The basket also included orzo and corn shoots of which she created a saffron pilaf and corn salad. Her dish was much loved by the judges — Amanda Freitag, Geoffrey Zacharian and guest judge Chef Edward Lee — even though she felt she had not presented it as well others did.
“Everyone had removed the snails from the shells and I was the only one who hadn’t. I was just praying that let me cross this round and I won’t do this again,” says Sampath, who has been cooking from age 13 when she discovered her mother’s unused cookbooks.
“I baked a chocolate cake and was in wonder how simple ingredients such as flour, butter, sugar just transformed into this beautiful fluffy deliciousness,” says Sampath, nostalgically. “That book got me hooked and my family started looking forward to what I would cook next. That’s when I realised that food brings people together”.
Sampath then took her passion to hospitality management school — India doesn’t have culinary schools — and was selected by the Taj group of hotels, going on to work with the company for five years. A decade ago the then almost 20-year-old decided to explore her passion further away from home.
“The best chefs are in Europe and the US. Despite family pressure to get married, I somehow managed to buy myself a year’s time. I came to the US and joined Johnson & Wales University in Rhode Island and did a specialisation in baking and pastry. That’s when I got an internship at Junoon”.
A fast learner, she quickly rose to chef de cuisine. Earlier in the year, Bhardwaj moved her to Orlando as executive chef in one of his restaurants. The venture however failed due to management disputes and Sampath returned to Junoon.
“It was a great experience for me doing everything from scratch. But somewhere — even though it wasn’t my fault — I felt I had failed. That’s when I applied for Chopped. I felt if I qualify I’d redeem myself”.
She underwent the rigorous selection process for the show as until the chef’s profile doesn’t fit their standards, one doesn’t get called for an interview, she says. The evaluation is both verbal and written and it takes months before the contestants know if they’ve qualified. It took eight months in her case. That’s when she started really practising and conceptualising dishes.
“A week before I had to go on it, Vikas said ‘don’t take it lightly’. He told me to chalk out every dish and I practised on speed, trying out dishes that I could adapt at the time” she explains.
This helped her to come up with dishes such as coconut and squash puree and bread upma with cookie-crusted fish in the second round and shahi tukda made from angel cake and pomegranate grenadine shreekhand for dessert.
“I was up against a pastry chef [in the final round]. She really knew what she was doing. Thank God I knew the basics even though I was a little sceptical. Her dessert definitely looked much prettier than mine,” she says.
After the win, Sampath has set herself two goals — and marriage is not one of them
“Unless I meet someone who really motivates me. One big reason Indian women are not progressing as much is because there are people who are discouraging them,” she said. “The restaurant is aiming for two Michelin stars, so that’s my work goal. Personally, I feel I need to learn more about food and do more competitive cooking. Failure with Indian cooking is we haven’t documented it. So everyone has a secret masala and secret recipe. Young chefs like us are documenting them now. I’m shooting for Top Chef too. If I win that, what I’ll achieve is I’ll set such a big example for women back home. As it is being a female chef is tough and then being Indian and winning is something else. When I get messages from young girls back home saying I’m an inspiration, I feel I have added responsibility and cannot sit back now”.
