The journey of a professionally trained homecook.
A personal culinary journal
Exploring the stories behind food — from forgotten traditions and regional kitchens to new flavours, techniques and unforgettable meals.
Cook/Research/Experiment/Tell a story
A midday thali, served the way it has been for generations — rice at the centre, everything else in orbit.
The featured story
Understanding one of Assam's most distinctive culinary traditions — and exploring how it can be interpreted for the modern kitchen.
Khar is not a spice, not a sauce and not quite a dish. It is an alkali, filtered from the ash of sun-dried banana peel, and it opens an Assamese meal the way an overture opens an opera. This is where the research began.
Read story
The person behind Palateful
A Gastronomist. A Storyteller.
My journey with food has always been driven by curiosity — a desire to understand not just how a dish is prepared, but why it tastes the way it does, where it comes from, and the stories it carries.
I am a professionally trained chef from Assam, with a Bachelor of Arts in International Culinary Arts from JIS University, Kolkata. My formal culinary education introduced me to the science, discipline and artistry of professional cooking, giving me a strong foundation in culinary techniques, food science, kitchen management and international cuisines.
My professional journey took me to Vivanta by Taj, Guwahati, where I had the privilege of learning, working and growing alongside some of the finest chefs in Assam. Working in a professional hospitality environment taught me the importance of precision, consistency, creativity and the dedication that goes into creating memorable dining experiences.
But beyond professional kitchens and culinary techniques, there is something that continues to fascinate me: the food of my homeland, Assam. I believe that traditional cuisines are more than collections of recipes. They are reflections of geography, climate, culture, history and generations of accumulated knowledge. From the distinctive chemistry of 'khar' to the delicate sourness of 'masor tenga', Assamese cuisine has an extraordinary culinary vocabulary that deserves to be explored, understood and documented.
That is why I created Palateful. Palateful is my personal culinary journal — a space where professional knowledge meets traditional wisdom, where curiosity leads to experimentation, and where every dish has a story worth telling. Here, I explore recipes, ingredients, culinary techniques, food science and regional food traditions. I research the origins of dishes, experiment with methods, understand the science behind flavours and share what I learn along the way. My approach is simple: Cook. Research. Experiment. Tell a story.
I believe in respecting culinary traditions while remaining open to innovation. I want to document the culinary knowledge that deserves to be preserved, explore the ingredients that make our regional cuisines unique, and make it accessible to anyone who shares my passion for food. For me, cooking is not merely about feeding people. It is about understanding cultures, preserving memories, discovering possibilities and creating experiences. Welcome to Palateful. Let's explore the world of food, one story at a time.
Four movements, always in that order. It is slower than writing recipes, and it is the only way I have found to actually understand a dish.
Before I read a single word about a dish, I cook it the way it was given to me. Badly, usually, the first time. The hands have to know the problem before the head can solve it.
Then I go looking — for the older version, the regional variation, the reason the ingredient is there at all. Most traditional cooking is solved engineering. Someone worked it out long before I arrived.
Only once I understand why a dish works do I have any right to change it. I take it apart, test one variable at a time, and keep notes on the failures — those are the useful ones.
A recipe without its context is just a list. I write down where the dish came from, what I got wrong, and what I would do differently. That is the part worth keeping.
Not the most popular things I cook — the ones that taught me the most. Each is a whole education in a single bowl.
মাছৰ মূৰৰ খাৰ
Fish head cooked with kolakhar and raw papaya. Alkaline, savoury, and utterly unlike anything else on the subcontinent. The dish that made me want to understand chemistry.
মাছৰ টেঙা
The sour fish curry that closes the meal. Light, clean, almost transparent — and far harder to balance than it looks, because there is nowhere for a mistake to hide.
হাঁহৰ মাংস
Duck slow-cooked with ash gourd, a Magh Bihu dish built for cold mornings. Almost no spice, an enormous amount of patience, and a depth I still cannot fully explain.
তিল পিঠা
Sticky rice rolled around black sesame and jaggery on a hot griddle. Pure technique — the batter, the heat and the wrist, with nothing to season and nowhere to cheat.
Every regional cuisine has a small number of load-bearing techniques. In Assam, these are the four everything else is built on — and none of them are about spice.
Layered souring
Sourness in Assam is not one note. Elephant apple, dried thekera, roselle, tomato and Assam lemon each land at a different point on the tongue — and the skill is in choosing which, and when.
Controlled fermentation
Young bamboo shoot, shredded and sealed until it turns sharp and faintly sulphurous. Used in drops rather than spoonfuls, it does what a fish sauce does in Southeast Asia — it makes everything taste more like itself.
Mashing and the raw-oil finish
Boil, mash, and finish with raw mustard oil, onion and chilli. The technique looks like nothing at all, which is exactly why it is unforgiving: there is no cooking left to fix a bad decision.
Five stages, and a great deal of doubling back.
Woodsmoke, a brass pot, and a household where the sour dish and the alkaline dish sat at opposite ends of the same meal for reasons nobody bothered to explain. I ate it for years before I found it interesting.
Culinary school, and the shock of discovering that everything I had watched at home had a name, a temperature and a reason. Mother sauces, brigade, mise en place. A different grammar for the same language.
Service. Speed, repetition, consistency, and the particular humility of cooking someone else’s menu very well for a very long time. It is the best technical education there is, and it leaves no room for curiosity.
I started cooking the food of home again, this time with the training. Some of it fell apart under scrutiny. Most of it turned out to be smarter than I was — solved problems I had assumed were superstition.
A place to do the work properly: cook the dish, research the dish, take it apart, and write down what actually happened. Including the failures. Especially the failures.
Roots
There is a habit in food writing of quietly presenting a modernised dish as the authentic one. It flatters the cook and erases the tradition. I would rather do the opposite: set down the original as faithfully as I can, explain why it is built that way, and only then show my own version — clearly labelled as mine.
So every Roots piece runs the same four movements, and you always know which one you are reading.
The dish as it is actually made, and by whom.
Why those ingredients, in that order, at that heat.
One variable at a time, with the failures recorded.
My interpretation — offered as an interpretation.
The publication is organised the way the work happens — from the pan, to the archive, to the page.
The homepage above stays where it is. This is the part that keeps moving.
Tradition
Understanding one of Assam's most distinctive culinary traditions — and exploring how it can be interpreted for the modern kitchen.
Flavour Science
Acid gets all the attention. The other end of the pH scale is doing quieter, stranger and more useful work.
Fish
The sour fish curry that closes an Assamese meal — clean, light and completely unforgiving of a heavy hand.
Tradition
Bamboo is a grass, a building material and — for about three weeks a year — one of the most powerful flavours in the Northeastern kitchen.
Fish
Fish head and raw papaya cooked with kolakhar — the alkaline dish that opens an Assamese meal, and the one that made me want to understand the chemistry.
Try khar, sour, bamboo or fermentation.
