Her Story
No culinary school.
A Delhi kitchen instead.
I learned to cook where Indian food actually lives — at home. Watching my mother and my grandmother, in a kitchen where recipes were never written down, only handed down.
I started cooking at ten. Self-taught — watching the women around me, and watching television like it was school: the MasterChef kitchens, Nigella Lawson, Atul Kochhar, and later the stories of Vikas Khanna. Then, at the tables of friends and family across India, the real classes: noticing how the same dal changes from state to state, how each household grinds its masala, what different palates reach for. That noticing was my training.
When we moved to England, I cooked the way I always had: masala built from scratch for every batch, no shortcuts, no restaurant tricks. Word spread from one Brighton kitchen — students missing home, parents too tired to cook, families who wanted dinner to taste like somebody's mother made it. Somebody's mother did.
That kitchen became Saakshi's Kitchen — my name on the door, my family's standard in every tray. And in 2026 came Yum! Curries. My title there says Recipe Director; the truth is simpler — every dish we serve, in either kitchen, passes through my hands and has to taste like home before it goes anywhere.
Today, meals I've curated are eaten in thousands of British homes — family-first food, made for the everyday. Not a treat night, not a takeaway craving: Monday dinner, done the way home does it. Every family's story begins in its kitchen — ours simply grew until it fed thousands of others.
