Long before The Big Family Cooking Showdown, Lorna Nanda Gangotra wowed the Woking Food and Drink Festival. Catherine Whyte has a chaat with her
Back in 2016, the news that Channel Four had poached GBBO from the BBC broke like a rotten egg. The nation wrung its collective hands in grief. What, we wondered, will the BBC do now?
Auntie’s answer was The Big Family Cooking Showdown (BFCS). It aired on BBC Two last autumn, delivering a savoury twist on a tried and tested format. While audience figures failed to match the whipped peaks of its GBBO rival, the viewers took a real shine to the show’s eventual winners, the Gangotras – two sisters and their sister-in-law – who wooed both judges and nation with their Indian home cooking and innovative takes on British classics. Their spiced-up version of fish and chips provided one of the show’s most memorable moments, earning them the nickname of the ‘Indian Spice Girls’.
Surrey foodies will also recognise Lorna Nanda Gangotra – one third of the winning trio – from Ripley Farmers Market, where she has built up a dedicated following by selling Indian home cooking and street food through her own food business, The Little Indian Kitchen.
Now, following her high-profile victory, she has been invited – with her culinary co-conspirators – to give one of the demonstrations at the ever-popular Woking Food and Drink Festival (WFDF) that takes place later this month.
Like typical working mothers, we choose a time just after the school run to chat. It’s taken us a while to coordinate our schedules – Lorna has been busy on a photoshoot and preparing for her sister Bobby’s wedding. It is no surprise to learn that she hasn’t yet decided what she’ll be cooking at the WFDF.
“We’ve had to wait until after the wedding to plan,” she says. “But we are really looking forward to it. I’ve had a stall for the past three years and really enjoy it. I like meeting people who buy my food and I think it works the other way, too. The festival is great at pushing local talent into the mainstream.”
Grant Pritchard
Indeed. This year the mainstream talent includes Silent Pool Distillers and Michelin maestro Bruno Loubet.
Even before her BFCS win, Lorna had become an essential ingredient of the event: her samosa chaat appears regularly in its Top Ten list of foods to try. Interestingly, however, she doesn’t describe herself as a professional chef, even though she ran a bistro in Wimbledon prior to opening The Little Indian Kitchen.
“I’m a home cook with a passion for food,” she insists. “I like to keep it real. Nothing fancy.”
Even so, Monica Galetti – then Senior Sous Chef at La Gavroche and now a judge on MasterChef: The Professionals – was a Wimbledon regular. Lorna must have been doing something right.
Witness her felicitous recruitment for BFCS. Television came calling – not the other way round. Approached by the production company while at the Wimbledon Food Festival, she just filled out a form and the rest is history. Nor was this the first such televisual request.
“I’d been asked to go on one of Jamie Oliver’s shows, but then children came along and I had to say no,” says Lorna.
No matter. All along, it seems, she was destined for the big screen.
“It was very intense,” she says of BFCS. “It took up a whole year of our lives. We practised, practised, practised. But it was worth it. Apart from winning, we also got a valuable insight into how things work behind the scenes, which I found very interesting.”
And there have been other benefits: the Gangotras have been introduced to viewers worldwide since streaming giant Netflix scooped up the show.
“I now have a wider audience taking an interest in what I’m doing,” says Lorna with obvious joy. “I still have my local stalls and I run bespoke cookery classes, but I also have some supper clubs and pop-ups planned. It’s very exciting.”
Woking Food and Drink Festival runs from Friday Aug 31 – Sunday Sept 2. The Gangotras will be conducting a live demonstration in the Tante Marie Culinary Academy onSept 2 at 10am (free to attend). For full details go to: wokingfoodfest.co.uk
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