Anyone who loves food — sweet, sour or savoury — will tell you cooking is an art. However, it is also a science, as flavour rests delicately on compositions, ingredients, temperature and density. Ask Chef Ratheesh Nair, the wizard behind the luscious bakery and pastry items at Grand Hyatt Kochi Bolgatty, and he will surprise you with the chemistry that happens in his kitchen every day.
Chef Ratheesh has around 13 years of culinary experience at leading Indian and international luxury hospitality spaces and cruise liners. His career started at the Oberoi Centre of Learning and Development.
“After that, it became my life. Being a pastry chef was an organic process for me,” he quips. During his career, he has worked across the country and beyond, and he has picked up all that piqued his attention. But above all, he is an artist who loves to draw and create — be it paintings in frames or the seven-layer Frangipani cake he made for Valentine’s Day at the Hotel.
With Easter around the corner, chef Ratheesh and team are busy making easter-special varieties. The highlight of the spread is the 1,000-year-old eggs. Also known as Century Eggs, the traditional Chinese egg-based culinary dish is prepared by preserving duck, chicken or quail eggs in a mixture of clay, ash, salt, quicklime, and rice hulls. They are left for several weeks or months, depending on the preparation style. The coating slowly dries and hardens into a crust over several months. This slow-made taste is an Easter-special delicacy celebrated all over the world, but one that is hard to find.
Down at Grand Hyatt, chef Ratheesh is reinventing this classic. The eggs come in three sizes — big, medium and small — and many colours, textures and flavours. “We have made the outer covering in many flavours, macha to coconut. The insides are hollow for now, but they can be filled up with a variety of mixtures,” he says. This mix and match and experimentation is what makes Chef Ratheesh’s desserts stand out. The science and molecular gastronomy enthusiast can explain to you in great detail the way flavours are made and unmade in the modern pastry kitchen.
“For example, the Easter eggs are made using a crumble. You will get many ready-made mixes for this in the market. But if you want to zero in on a particular sweet-sour combination, you make it yourself,” he says, talking about a passion fruit crumble he made in the kitchen. “It has got cocoa butter, white chocolate and passionfruit flavouring. You cook the sugar and add the passion fruit and white chocolate. Then you oven-dry the mixture and leave it for 24 hours. This is then powdered and used or stored. Say, now you want to add a white chocolate twist to a dessert. When you add this crumble, it would add the sourness of passion fruit to it too, which would work better in many cases,” he says.
Alongside the easter egg, the chef and his team are also working on a variety of bread. “Getting each layer of the bakeries right is a challenge,” says Executive Chef Yoginder Pal, who also joined us for a tour of the pastry kitchen, which had readied up some fresh dough in time, baked without yeast. Pralines, simnel cakes and so many more exciting, eclectic flavours await guests at the hotel, courtesy of Chef Ratheesh’s curiosity. “Our idea is to always create and recreate confectionery that is new to our guests. It is a slow process, and you have to always substitute what you cannot find and experiment, which makes it exciting,” concludes chef Ratheesh.
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