An independent kitchen notebook for South Indian vegetarian cooking, written by two people who cook this food at home.
Aryaas is a kitchen notebook. It exists because the South Indian vegetarian recipes we grew up with are widely published online and, more often than not, published badly: a list of quantities, a stock photograph, and nothing that tells you what to do when the batter refuses to rise or the rasam comes out tasting of nothing.
We write the other way round. Technique first, quantities second, and a troubleshooting section on every guide that names the specific failure and its cause. The aim is that after reading one of our guides you could cook the dish in a different kitchen, with a different grinder, in a different climate, and still get it right.
Lakshmi Venkatesan grew up in Madurai and has spent fifteen years writing down and re-testing the tiffin and sambar recipes she learned at home. She develops and photographs most of what appears here, and she is the one who insists every batter recipe be tested on both a wet grinder and an ordinary mixer, because most readers do not own a wet grinder.
Joseph Mathew was raised in Kottayam and writes about the regional differences that get flattened when South Indian food is treated as a single cuisine. He covers Kerala cooking, festival menus and the history behind dishes, and he edits and fact-checks every guide before it goes live.
We are not a restaurant. We do not take bookings, sell ingredients, or run a catering business, and we are not affiliated with any restaurant or company trading under a similar name. Nobody can pay to have an ingredient, a brand or a product recommended in a recipe. Where a page carries clearly labelled advertising or an affiliate link, it is disclosed under our advertising and affiliate policies.
Every recipe is cooked at least twice in an ordinary home kitchen before publication, on a domestic gas hob, with equipment a reader is likely to own. Where a dish genuinely depends on specialist equipment we say so and give the workaround. Where a traditional step can be skipped without harming the result, we say that too. The full process is set out in how we test recipes.
There is no single authentic version of sambar, or avial, or filter coffee. There are family versions, district versions and community versions, and they disagree with each other. We name which version we are giving rather than presenting one as definitive, and we note what changes if you want another. When we get a regional detail wrong, readers tell us, and we correct it under our fact-checking policy.
Corrections, regional variations we have missed, and questions about a recipe that did not work are all welcome. Write to us through the contact page. We read everything and reply within three business days.
Lakshmi grew up in Madurai in a household where the wet grinder ran every second evening. She has spent fifteen years writing down, testing and re-testing the tiffin and sambar recipes she learned at home, and she develops and photographs most of the recipes on Aryaas.
Joseph writes about the regional differences that get flattened when South Indian food is treated as one cuisine. Raised in Kottayam, he covers Kerala cooking, festival menus and the history behind dishes, and he edits every guide before it is published.