Upma-nship

You could say Floyd Cardoz won this year’s Top Chef Masters challenge for his rendang, which is probably the truth. Or you could say that Floyd Cardoz won for his upma, which makes a much better story. Either way, that would be missing the point.

First, the upma story. Among the dishes Cardoz, formerly executive chef at New York’s iconic Tabla restaurant, served in his winning menu for the last challenge in Top Chef was an inspired riff on this Udupi restaurant classic. Upma’s a polarizing dish: either you like salty and sometimes soggy semolina porridge infested with chopped vegetables or you don’t, and that description might indicate the camp I belong to.

Well-cooked upma has many virtues—it’s nutritious, it’s an art getting the semolina, or rice flour, to the right consistency, and it’s a vehicle for an astonishing array of temperings, masalas and vegetables. Upma lovers approach their mess of pottage with grave tenderness, just as khichdi lovers will point out the dexterity of a meal that can be both sickroom food and party centerpiece. But Cardoz didn’t stick with the conventional sooji-cashew nuts-carrots and peas recipe.

His upma, served as a first course, was a “Wild Mushroom Upma Polenta”, with kokum and coconut milk. The coconut milk adds richness; the kokum is a subtler way of including the tanginess we usually add by squeezing lemon juice over the upma. The mushrooms — maitake for a crisp meatiness, oyster and king oyster mushrooms — were an inspired addition. Cardoz’s upma also benefitted from home-made chicken stock, white port and a classic cilantro (coriander)-ginger-chilli pepper tempering.

His rendang was built on similar lines: strip the original recipe down to its basics, stay faithful to the techniques and then build it back up. His version of the classic Malaysian meat curry used oxtail and short ribs — a brilliant combination of cuts, with the oxtail adding deep flavour, for his rendang-two-ways. It was a reinvention and a homage to the original, much like his now-notorious upma; and he served it with his take on sabudana khichdi.

The rendang was the dish that wowed Top Chef’s judges, who included Ruth Reichl and Gael Greene. (Cardoz’s second course, Rice-Flaked Snapper in a tomato-fennel broth, was uneven, and he said later that the rice flakes hadn’t cooked long enough.) The upma caught everyone's imagination because it’s like winning a cooking challenge with a bread-and-jam sandwich. But what made Cardoz a winner was just the combination of imagination and respect for food that he’d put into Tabla back in 1998.

When Daniel Boulud took a grand tour of France with a brigade of fellow chefs, he wrote about the most memorable dishes they had on that trip. In his mind, what lingered were not the grand productions — partridge and porcinis, veal en cocotte. “What I remembered most was an exceedingly simple Georges Blanc vichysoisse with scallops, oysters and caviar — in other words, a basic peasant dish, vichysoisse, transformed by additional ingredients into something noble and sublime. Simplicity and eccentricity made it memorable.”

At home, I try a poor-man’s-version of Cardoz’s rich-man’s upma, with shiitake mushrooms standing in for the maitake and no port wine. Despite the substitutions, it works; and despite my upma aversion, a spoonful of Cardoz’s upma brings on an unexpected wave of nostalgia for idli breakfasts, sooji halwa, the first encounter with a porcini mushroom risotto. I don’t know what magic chefs work when they tap into taste memories with their recipes, but with this and his rendang, Cardoz has earned all of his Top Chef Masters accolades.

Nilanajana Roy is a Delhi-based writer