In the fortnight before Diwali, the kitchens of India fill with aromas only few other occasions can summon: cardamom cracked beneath a pestle, saffron unfurling in warm milk, jaggery sliding into caramel as ghee turns gold in heavy bottomed pan. That fragrance has traditionally found its way into the mithai box, dressed in decorative paper and carried from one doorstep to the next, bearing the season’s sweetest expression of generosity.
The conversation around Indian ingredients in pastry has almost always centred on reinvention: kaju katli recast as cake, nankhatai reinvented as a buttery sablé, jalebi transformed into an entremet. But the more compelling shift is away from novelty and towards understanding. In some of India’s finest pastry kitchens, the challenge is no longer to make a familiar ingredient look unfamiliar, but to understand its character, respect its complexity and let its flavour lead.
This Diwali, four pastry chefs — Vikas Bagul, co-founder of the School for European Pastry; Bani Nanda, co-founder of Miam Pâtisserie; Heena Punwani, founder of Maska Bakery; and Tejasvi Chandela, founder of Dzurt Jaipur — offer a glimpse of how Indian flavours are finding new expression in contemporary pastry.
The change is easier to appreciate when you remember where it began. Nanda trained in Indian hotels, as she recalls, a dessert menu earned its flair from raspberries flown in from the Netherlands or purées shipped from France. Reaching for local produce was close to heresy. “Using Nolen gur instead of maple syrup? Blasphemy.” That was ten or twelve years ago.
The shift, in her telling, began in stand-alone restaurants, whose hot kitchens gave ingredients such as fiddlehead ferns a chance and gave farmers the platform they had long wanted. Today Nanda scouts the country for indigenous harvests and can serve a cremeux of taal pulp where a kheer might once have been expected. Her theory is that guests simply need “a little nudge”, with enough context and storytelling to feel the excitement the chef feels. Over years, that approach has carried menus built around sohiong, sohshang, sea buckthorn, taal pulp, gur and mahua.
What has changed, then, is the freedom to rethink tradition without being bound by it. Bagul says it plainly: “We don’t have to recreate a traditional Indian dessert to showcase Indian flavours.” A familiar taste can be taken as inspiration and presented in a completely new way, and diners, he finds, are increasingly willing to follow.
Creative freedom, however, is not a licence to reinvent without restraint. On this, all four chefs are strikingly aligned. Whatever the technique, whether fermentation, infusion, freeze-drying or gelification, the ingredient has to remain the point. “The starting point should always be the ingredient, not the technique,” says Bagul, and the aim is “to enhance their character, not hide it.”
Punwani and Chandela describe the same discipline as a question the chef must answer first: what makes the original memorable? Only once that is understood then can the form, sweetness and acidity be rebalanced around it. Chandela is generous about the source material, noting that “sometimes, the traditional preparation itself is far more sophisticated than we give it credit for”, and she offers a test any cook could apply: “If someone has to be told what the dessert is inspired by, I think you’ve probably taken the interpretation too far.” Punwani sees it from the diner’s perspective, which is the joy of discovering something new, followed by a moment of recognition.
The ingredients that lend themselves to this approach are as diverse as India itself. Bagul is drawn to kokum, for its acidity and colour, and to jamun, with its slightly astringent character. Nanda points to India’s many citrus fruits, from the floral, peppery Khasi lemon of the north-east, which she likens to yuzu, to the galgal of the Himalayan foothills and the Rangpur limes of the Western Ghats. Chandela prizes jaggery, saffron, cardamom and rose, but also the textures of boondi, ghevar and Jaipur’s fini, which French pastry has no equivalent for. Punwani, meanwhile, finds room for the savoury, where curry leaf and cumin challenge “the idea that pastry must always be sweet.”
What matters most is what arrives at the table, and the festive menus reveal three distinct approaches.
The first is to change the form while keeping the memory. For Diwali, Punwani has reimagined three classic mithais as fudge: a Kaju “Katli” Fudge with single-origin Idukki chocolate ganache, an Almond “Pedha” Fudge built up with shortbread, almond butter fudge and apricot jam, and a Coconut “Barfi” Fudge sandwiched with raspberry pâte de fruit. She has also put the marigold, the flower of every festive doorway, on a cake, because chefs regularly garnish celebration cakes with flowers yet almost never with this one.
The second is to rebalance. Chandela’s Boondi Lemon Tart sets the sweetness of boondi against the sharpness of lemon curd, and the contrast worked on the very first attempt. Her Ghevar Tart took several, because ghevar is an exacting preparation. “Sometimes the innovation lies in an unexpected flavour pairing, and sometimes the real challenge is mastering the traditional technique before attempting to reinterpret it.”
The third is to borrow from the source. Nanda looks to provenance for her ideas, which is how Goan cashew praline came to fill a Baci di Dama, and how the fermentation of betel nut on Meghalaya’s farms became a starting point for a plated dessert. At a recent event, her team candied chhuhara (pooja dates), which are almost never found in a chef’s pantry, and folded them into a sablé, where they gave “a chewy surprise.”
This process, however, is far from straightforward, as the chefs readily acknowledge. The first challenge is consistency. Seasons shift the acidity and sugar of fruit, mawa varies in moisture and richness, and classical pastry depends on precision. “Understanding how an ingredient behaves is as important as understanding how it tastes,” says Punwani. Chandela’s team found this with Alwar milk cake as the flavour and sweetness were right, but once frozen into a petit gâteau, its characteristic graininess disappeared, and they chose not to take it forward.
The second lies further back, in the supply chain, and it is a hopeful one. Many Indian ingredients are not yet as well studied for modern pastry as their European counterparts, and Bagul believes the answer is for chefs to work more closely with farmers and suppliers. Nanda’s journey to Kanha, in Madhya Pradesh, shows what that involves. There she watched tribal communities pick mahua flowers, dry and ferment them for their own use, with little interest in bulk orders, an encounter she says pulled her out of “the sinkhole of trade and consumerism.”
The third is the diner. Punwani notes that guests will happily try chocolate or matcha in a tart but hesitate over jamun or kairi, flavours they grew up with. Curiosity, she says, takes time to build, and Indian ingredients deserve “the same excitement and openness that we readily extend to flavours from elsewhere.”
Taken together, these conversations suggest that the real measure of this movement lies not in how many Indian ingredients appear on a menu, but in how well they are understood. Novelty may catch the eye, but it rarely lasts. What matters is understanding an ingredient’s character, from the way jaggery behaves to the delicate lattice of ghevar, and using that knowledge to create something worth returning to. Chandela hopes to see chefs move beyond a familiar set of flavours to explore India’s wider repertoire of regional preparations. Bagul, meanwhile, wants Indian ingredients to be valued for their quality, both at home and internationally, instead of being used simply to give a dessert an Indian identity.
This Diwali, the mithai box will arrive as it always has, and rightly so. Alongside it, there may be a marigold-topped chocolate cake, a boondi lemon tart or a spoonful of taal crémeux. Each offers a different expression of the same idea: Indian ingredients do not need to be reinvented to be relevant. They need to be understood, handled with care and given room to speak for themselves.