An Indian Food Writer Breaks Free From Tradition (Published 2018) (2024)

OAKLAND, Calif. — The food writer Nik Sharma was 8 when he made his first pot of rice. It was a disaster.

He found a bottle of Rooh Afza, a rose-flavored concentrated syrup popular throughout South Asia, in the studio apartment in the Bandra neighborhood of Mumbai, India, where he grew up in the late 1980s. Though Rooh Afza is typically mixed into cold water or milk, Mr. Sharma had other plans. “I remember thinking, ‘Wouldn’t it be cool if you put the Rooh Afza in the rice so it smelled like roses?’” he said.

The syrup turned the rice an atomic pink hue. It was disturbingly sweet. After a few bites, he threw it out.

His failure was an early cooking lesson: Be bold with flavors. Don’t be reckless.

Today, Mr. Sharma, 38, has a more measured approach to experimentation, a philosophy he distills in his first cookbook, “Season: Big Flavors, Beautiful Food,” out this week from Chronicle Books. It’s a book in which he toys with flavor combinations, chopping unripe green mangoes and stirring them into mayonnaise to make a verdant tartar sauce, and working an extract of caramelized fig and bourbon into glasses of iced chai.

Over the past few years, Mr. Sharma has amassed a following between his food blog, A Brown Table, and his regular cooking column in The San Francisco Chronicle. As with his column, he took all the book’s photographs himself. Their dark, noiseless backgrounds emphasize the elements of the composition that matter most: his brown hands, and his food.

The light-soaked kitchen at his home here in Oakland, which he shares with his husband, Michael Frazier, their two cats and a dog, is charmingly chaotic. The spice drawer is clogged with dozens of jars: ancho chile, juniper berries, fenugreek powder. A collection of nearly 400 cookbooks spills from his living room into his kitchen. (“It’s not a lot,” Mr. Sharma said, shrugging.) Pieces of black cast-iron cookware, from teakettles to Dutch ovens, dot every corner of the room.