Gayatri Desai, chef and founder at Pune’s experimental kitchen and fermentary Ground Up, talks about the unique flavour of ferns and lemons, using every last part of bamboo, and why fermentation is intrinsic to the way she cooks and thinks.
Gayatri Desai is deep in the throes of preparing for the Wild Food Festival that takes place in Mumbai every year (in its seventh edition in 2025), when she finally finds time for this call.
The Wild Food Festival celebrates India’s wild and foraged foods, the landscapes and ecosystems that make foraging possible, and more importantly, the communities that have preserved them for generations. As part of the Festival, restaurants, including Ground Up, work with and feature wild foods on their menus. In the case of Ground Up, the association runs deeper, and longer.
Gayatri is trying to pack about 100 jars of ferments (including kimchis, pickles, vinegars, and syrups) that she, and the staff at Ground Up has worked on, to carry to the festival. “There was so much R&D time, and experimenting! Imagine, I’ve kept some of these ferments for a year,” she tells me, hurried but excited.
As someone using fermentation and preservation as a primary method of cooking, Gayatri is uniquely placed to work with wild foods, which are seasonal, and not available in abundance. She sources a large portion of her vegetables and pantry essentials directly from farmers, in collaboration with organisations like OOO Farms, a Farmer Producer Company which democratises agriculture by practising profit-sharing among tribal farming communities. “I work in reverse—where they [the farmers] tell me what they want to give me. I don’t dictate the terms.”
What does this mean when it comes to setting up her own kitchen and fermentary? To find out, and learn more about Gayatri’s sometimes funky, sometimes sweet, but always exciting work, read excerpts from our interview here:
What does fermentation as a cooking technique mean to you? What does it take to run a fermentary, and how do you see it growing?
Fermentation is imperative to how I cook. I have included it [fermentation] in my cooking style because I was exposed to it when I was in culinary school, and the chefs around me (whether with miso or rice vinegar) were using it as an additional flavour profile, and not only a souring agent. This caught my attention. And then I sought out fermentation, and fermented things every time I travelled. Most importantly though, when you want to work with farmers and when you get seasonal produce ( sometimes in large numbers), there is no other way to keep it for a long period of time until you preserve or ferment it.
When we started the Fermentary, I didn’t know what a fermentary needed and looked like. I did have some exposure to massive scales of fermentation when I spent three months in Japan, in 2023. I hopped from one brewery or fermentary to another: one had just koji being made, another had only miso; that was my little reference.
The Fermentary at Ground Up, housed beneath the open kitchen is a work in progress. The kind of gadgets, space, and controls it calls for—Gayatri is figuring it out as she goes. Illustration (R) by Vidhi Jain.
I don’t know where it’s going to go, because it’s so niche. But it’s been two years of setting it up, and we’re not only doing miso, but also vinegars. We are working with wild foods too. We might be successful with some soy sauce we are working on… Where it stands today, it has the capacity to take in large batches of wild foods, which I didn’t think I could ever do.
Turning 100 kilos of a vegetable into something seemed impossible, but the fermentary allowed me to do it. Space is always a constraint, but the kind of processes we have here, the equipment we have, the way we are designed, it allows for this.
What kind of equipment and ingredients do you need?
We have smokers, dehydrators, temperature- and humidity-controlled rooms. For the drying process, we need space where there is exposure to the sun.
I keep the kimchi and the wild ferments with the miso in the same room. And of course, I use air locks for everything. You seal the jar with the lid, then there’s an air lock on top of it, which helps the gases inside the jar to flow out, but won’t allow outside air to enter the jars.
An important thing while fermenting is that we make sure every single ingredient is excellent, especially with wild foods. I use very good inland salt, all the way from Kutch. If we use sugar, we only use unprocessed Khandsari or raw sugar.
This is something I learned from the Japanese: If you’re making miso, which has three ingredients, you need to make sure every ingredient is the best you can find, you need to know the source. If the wild food is pure, then the salt also has to be pure.
What is your process for working with wild foods, especially wild greens?
I use a basic kimchi process—there’s heavy salting to preserve the greens, then there’s squeezing to get all the vegetal liquid out. There is a combination of kimchi: water kimchi, which is more liquid, without any chilli powder, and the other one that looks redder, the more classic kimchi.
Now because I’m [working at] a fermentary, I have a lot of miso around me. There is also tamari, which is something that floats on top of miso, like a gluten-free soy sauce.
A traditional kimchi will not have soy sauce or tamari. But I want to add another complex flavour to the greens which exists in the fermentary. So, I do a combination of vinegar, tamari, and rice starch water. Rice starch is what is predominantly used to make kimchi. I use rice from OOO Farms, make a starch liquid out of it, and use it as a fermenting agent, along with tamari and vinegar. The three combined make these kimchis that I’m working on with wild food greens.
At the Ground Up Fermentary, there are now nine kinds of kimchi, including ones that use wild foods like Kurdu and Bafli.
What are some of your favourite ingredients to work with?
The one I find really unique is the kimchi made from Akkarghoda, a kind of fern. I got lemons from OOO Farms, so I’ve used a lot of lemon zest; I find the fern and lemons go really well together. That’s one of my favourites on the menu.
We also have a cold-brew Akkarghoda tea. Akkarghoda is the most perishable—half of it has already discoloured or blackened when you get it. So we separated those; the ones that were turning slightly black were smoked and made into tea. The flavour is still intact, but the appearance is not like the green Akkarghoda, which we fermented.
Whether it’s turning yellow, whether it’s wilting, whether it’s blackening—the idea is to not waste a single leaf that comes.
Whether it’s turning yellow, whether it's wilting, whether it's blackening—the idea is to not waste a single leaf that comes.
When Shailesh Awate, from OOO Farms, sends vegetables, they come in batches. The first lot is tender, then they get progressively more mature. We play with them accordingly.
We love the colour and flavour of the Ambadi stem, which is Wild Roselle, and we made beautiful simple syrup with it. We turned the Kurdu stem into a sweet soy pickle using tamari. And that has turned out damn good—slightly sweet, salty and sour, richly umami, all together.
We also love dried bamboo. We’ve used all three parts of the bamboo—the top part, tender, is used in our Ground Up Strawberry Vinegar. The middle part is sliced with a mandolin, and made into a dry pickle with mustard, fresh chilli, and ginger, without any oil. It’s amazing, I could add it to anything. As for the bottom part of the bamboo—we smashed it with a lot of chillies, ginger, and sugar, and let the liquid ooze out. Maybe next year we’ll put it in a bottle and serve it as aged bamboo water. It can be used in multiple things.
Wild foods are available for a short window of time, and aren’t always available in abundance. Oftentimes they are pungent or bitter. How does your love for fermenting and preserving foods as well as using condiments complement this?
When you go to the market, or have somebody like OOO Farms sending wild foods, then all you can do is eat it for a day or two—make a sabzi or a stir-fry out of it, put it in a dal. But if I’m giving you a salted leaf, a rice-water pickled leaf, a kimchi or a salt, or something preserved in vinegar, then you can put small amounts of it in the food you’re experimenting with—at home or at a restaurant kitchen—for a much longer period of time.
I also want to get into salts; some leaves, like Ambadi, are beautifully sour. How would making a sour leaf salt play out? So, there is a constant back and forth between me and OOO Farms. I cannot possibly come up with all of this by myself. We collaborate very closely to understand how best to experiment with these.
The other interesting thing is, despite the short span when these wild uncultivated foods are available, they are so hardy, and have so much intrinsic flavour, that most of these kimchis have stayed chewy, crunchy, and intact. Its structure hasn’t broken down. I have some batches that have been with me for a year (though some of them have to be refrigerated), and they’ve done very well. They stand through everything—through all the chilli, the salt—and retain their flavour.
Palak will never stand through what a Kurdu will stand through. These greens are very special. They may seem fibrous, itchy, bitter, astringent—but all of this is celebrated. Some of it has to come through, some of it you have to remove. It’s a combination, and for you to interpret. I’m using Japanese techniques; I’m also borrowing from kimchi, which is Korean; I’m using techniques from northeast India; ingredients from Palghar—that amalgamation is very necessary for me and how I think.
How do your trips to Palghar, and your meeting with foragers from the Kokni or Warli communities, influence your work in the kitchen?
One of the things I loved the most is the mushrooms. But you can’t get mushrooms here in Pune, you just have to be happy picking them, and eating them in Palghar.
I like to see how communities work with respect to flavour combinations—their pickling methods are so simple, yet there are tiny nuances—they will blanch something and salt it, or they won’t blanch, but only salt some ingredients.
These greens are very special. They may seem fibrous, itchy, bitter, astringent—but all of this is celebrated. Some of it has to come through, some of it you have to remove.
They are treating some wild vegetables, like Tetu or Kharshinga, like you would brine or cure an olive. Olives have many toxins in them, just like some of these wild vegetables—they keep letting out black water. So you have to keep changing the water. The result is this beautifully salted, brined pickle. And there is no difference in the processes used for olives and this wild vegetable. So I keep drawing parallels between Palghar and what I’ve seen on my other travels—it’s always an amalgamation.
How does the staff at Ground Up interact with wild foods and fermenting?
The energy in the space, when wild food is involved, is very different. We work extra hard. When Shailesh sends me the greens, my Fermentary is packed, every corner is filled—one with Akkarghoda, once with Kurdu, one with Bafli, it’s everywhere.
When the processing has to happen, it’s all hands on deck. You need to prepare the team and the space, you need to have a plan. Everybody is fully involved—right from the care required in the picking, to the blanching, to making the kimchi, and then taking care of it.
Everybody tastes, everybody has a role to play, everybody gives their comments, and we are open to feedback. Everybody comes together and does just this one thing. Everything else pauses.
Pradyut is one of our employees, and we give the bamboo only to him. We don’t let anybody else touch the bamboo. He’s doing maximum interaction with the food, so obviously his microbes are in every single ferment. I cannot define what exactly it is, scientifically, but it’s an old-school way of saying “When your hands touch the bamboo, then nothing will go wrong. The bamboo will taste the best when you make it.”
Mukta Patil is Projects Editor at The Locavore. She works on stories that spotlight the intricacies of our food systems, and how they interact with the climate emergency, the environment, and people,
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