№ 95 : 5 Ingredient Indian with Chetna Makan

In this Episode

Watch the full episode here

We had one of our favorite return guests back on the show this week: Chetna Makan, the Great British Bake Off fan favorite turned YouTube institution (a million-plus devotees across her platforms, a decade of Food with Chetna), whose new book, Chetna’s 5-Ingredient Indian, landed on American shelves the day before we recorded—which makes this, as far as we can tell, her first U.S. interview for it. Enjoy!

Highlights & “Must-Listen” Moments

* [00:00]—Welcome, Chetna: We open with Chetna’s bio—Bake Off in 2014, a YouTube channel that’s quietly become one of the most trusted resources for home Indian cooking, and book number nine (or ten, depending how you count)—before she walks us through the actual premise of Chetna’s 5-Ingredient Indian: not a gimmick, but a direct answer to home cooks who assume Indian cooking requires a full spice cabinet and a free afternoon.

* [02:00]—Why five ingredients, really: Chetna explains the constraint wasn’t arbitrary—it came out of watching people get intimidated by long ingredient lists, and a cookbook market she felt had nothing genuinely new to say. The test case: her red kidney bean curry, stripped of the tomatoes, extra coriander, and green chili most versions lean on, while keeping onion, ginger, and garlic as the flavor spine.

* [09:43]—The spice blends are the real trick: This is the section to read twice. Garam masala, chaat masala, and tandoori masala all got reverse-engineered down to five ingredients apiece—“hard work,” Chetna says, because “every spice adds a different note.” Her own invention, sabji masala (turmeric, hing, cumin, coriander, plus one more), doesn’t exist anywhere in traditional Indian cooking; she built it from scratch to solve her own five-ingredient math problem. David draws the parallel to his own Portuguese red pepper paste—built for the same reason, to save people from re-assembling the same six ingredients every time they cook.

* [17:36]—Atom masala and the mango pickle: A listener question about Priya Krishna’s New York Times piece on recreating her family’s lost “Atom Masala” leads Chetna into the one recipe she’s never gotten back: her grandmother’s raw mango pickle, peeled rather than skin-on, with a spice blend nobody wrote down before she died.

* [19:17]—The lost-recipe roundtable: What starts as a question to Amy turns into three generations of food going extinct—Amy’s grandmother’s mocha and marble cakes, a neighbor’s famously unshared ricotta fritters, and David’s own grandmother’s pink Portuguese chicken soup (the inspiration, he explains, for both his entire career in food writing and the pink shirt he happened to be wearing). Chetna’s take on people who refuse to share recipes: “Just tell me when you want to eat it” is not a substitute for a recipe card.

* [24:39]—Between the Slices and the new fans: Chetna explains the unexpected second life of her sandwich series—millions of views, a flood of younger viewers in India who now stop her on the street for sandwiches instead of curry. “It’s slightly annoying,” she says, “that they don’t stop me for my Indian food.”

* [28:49]—The one onion mistake everyone makes: If you only watch one clip from this episode, make it this one. Chetna’s diagnosis of what home cooks get wrong: onions that never actually get cooked. “They don’t give it time to get to deep golden—it needs to be a caramel color.” David’s hack for speeding that up without babysitting the pan: a splash of water and a lid, early on, to soften the onions before they caramelize.

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