Got a hankering for some home-made Indian food but don’t feel like committing to a labor intensive recipe? Fear not, fellow foodie friends, for the fine folks at Moji Masala have got you covered.
Moji Masala brings pre-measured, freshly ground Indian spice blends and cooking recipes to the masses, readily available for at-home cooking as they’re conveniently packaged in single-use seasoning packet format. The hand-packed spice blend bundles contain age-old family recipes from the mother and grandmother of co-founder Shireen Qadri, whose family originally hails from Kashmir, located in the Himalayan Mountains of northern India.
Both Qadri and her West Islip-born husband JD Walsh developed a deep love for Indian cuisine: Qadri’s coming from her familial roots, while Walsh’s came from him spending five years on the subcontinent working to bring the game of basketball to the country.
During a car ride back to their New York City home after a visit with Qadri’s family — containers in tow holding leftovers of their favorite dishes, expertly (and laboriously) prepared by Qadri’s mother — the pair realized it would not be easy, nor cheap, to try to replicate the meal they had just enjoyed in their own home.
“First of all, you’d basically have to buy anywhere between 15 to 20 spices just to complete one dish,” Walsh says. “And it’s almost always a 30-step recipe. Shireen spend about three years developing and reverse engineering the spice blend recipes.”
The husband-and-wife duo got to work, initially developing their brand at East End Food, a non-profit operating on Stony Brook Southampton’s campus which provides commercial kitchen space for start-up food entrepreneurs, about four years ago with the spice packets now prepared and packaged in Philadelphia.
While the Hamptons-born product is widely available online (click here to check it out) as well as via big box brands, like Walmart, Fresh Direct and Amazon, it’s pretty easy to find locally at a handful of South Fork locales, like Provisions, L’Epicuriste and Curated Fine Meats. Last month, the pair onboarded their product at all three Citarella locations, doing demonstrations and providing samples for the public. Their products will be sold at East Hampton, Bridgehampton and Southampton Citarellas and a handful of dishes will be featured at the eatery’s hot bar.
Fittingly, “moji” means mother in Kashmiri, while “masala” stands for any blend of various ground spices and herbs in Indian cuisine. Each spice packet is labeled with easy-to-follow cooking instructions as well as a QR code that allows you to watch a video on how to create the dish, step by step. Recipes include some familiar favorites as well as a range from vegan and vegetarian to meat-centric options and dishes serve between two and six people and are usually ready in about 30 minutes. There are about a dozen different spice blends available and each packet starts at around $5. According to Walsh, the contents of the packets are sourced from certified organic spices from small batch growers located all over the world.
“The goal was to develop a way to eliminate a good amount of the cooking steps,” says Walsh, “but still promote healthy eating and be cost conscious.”
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