Bhubaneswar: Can the Italian risotto be cooked and served in an Odia tribal style? Believe it or not! But homecook-turned-tribal food consultant and Masterchef India fame, Madhusmita Soren loves giving a tribal twist to continental dishes.
This way, she is doing her bit to keep tribal recipes from Odisha, especially the ones borrowed from the Santhal community, alive. And it’s no rocket science, as she puts it. She loves to mix and match the ingredients to customize and tweak the dishes. For instance, she replaces Arborio rice—a variety grown in Italy’s Piedmont region and known for its rounded grains that become firm, creamy and chewy when cooked—with the red rice, a common ingredient in tribal cuisine of Odisha.
“Risotto is nothing but the ‘khichdi’ that we prepare in Odia households. So, I realised it can be easily given an Odia and Santhali twist if cooked with local variants of rice available in our state,” she explained.
Madhusmita has also tried adding tribal flavours to the Italian Arancini Balls, which are basically rice balls stuffed with cheese. “For this dish also, I changed the main ingredient and used red rice. I replaced bed crumbs used for coating the balls with rice flour, which also gives a crispy texture to the dish once fried,” she told Odisha Bytes.
Red weaver ant (Hao) chutney was one of her recipes that was an instant hit among celebrity judges in the eighth season of Masterchef India. This rare GI-tagged chutney is a common item in the tribal cuisine in Mayurbhanj district. It is known for its medicinal and nutritional properties. “It was a dream come true for me to be able to showcase the red ant chutney on a national platform. I could clear misconceptions that the chutney is not prepared with the regular ants, but is a paste of red weaver ant, which is found on mango leaves,” she explained.
On the Masterchef India platform, she had also showcased dishes like ‘Patla Pitha’, Palwa Chutney’ and much more.
Know more about Madhusmita…
A native of Rairangpur in Odisha’s Mayurbhanj district, Madhusmita—a Santhali girl— has no formal training in cooking. In fact, she has an engineering degree. In 2016, she had to discontinue her PhD in wireless communication at IIT Bhubaneswar to be able to take care of her family after marriage. Prior to that, she had completed her BE from KIIT University and masters in electronics and communication from CET, Bhubaneswar. “I was finding it difficult to manage my household responsibilities while pursuing PhD and that’s why I quit pursuing it. To fill the void, I then turned to food photography,” she recalled.
During the Covid outbreak in 2020, she had her first tryst with culinary competitions in the online mode. She had participated in India’s Home Chef and won her maiden trophy. This bolstered her will to take the plunge for earning fame with her culinary skills, much of which has been honed and nurtured by casual interactions with her mother in the kitchen. She then auditioned for the seventh season of Masterchef Inida, but wasn’t able to get through. But, she didn’t give up and came back to be among top 22 contestants in the popular show’s eight edition. Presently, she is working as a tribal food consultant at KIIT and IIHM and also conducts workshops with the aim of popularising tribal cuisine across India.