By now, Kala Ghoda is on the list of locals and visitors alike. There’s enough culture to soak in, cafes to step into and shops to browse: from the high-end to the everyday. And that’s just in the area centred round the now defunct Rhythm House.
Now, a couple of streets over, on Allana Marg, cookie lovers may make a beeline for Oh Dough, which has cookies, coffee and ice cream on the menu.
Siblings Pawan and Ritika Chawla are behind the recently opened bakery. While Pawan has a hotel management degree from École hôtelière de Lausanne, and experience in working with guest relations at hotels in Dubai, Ritika has a diploma in patesserie at Le Cordon Bleu, London, under her belt.
Tough cookieGoing back to how it all began, Ritika says, “I was never into baking, I mean, I love food”; but don’t we all do. What started out as experimentation in the kitchen after work hours morphed into Oh Dough, with a menu that stands till today.
She says the interest veered towards “You know, okay, let me bake a cake one morning. Tried it out and actually flopped at it. Tried to make a carrot cake, which a friend of mine makes, but it didn’t go well; it got burnt the first time. Made it again, it turned out pretty good. Had some friends from New York who were down, and they tried and it they liked it. You know when people appreciate your stuff you get motivated to try new things.” Soon she was baking after work every night, and, “as a joke, I just told my dad, ‘you know, maybe I should just go to the school and take this up,’ and he was like, ‘ok go’, and I was like, ‘wait a minute, I don’t know if he’s kidding with me or not’. I said ‘ok, maybe I should look into it.’” After some research, she decided to pursue a nine-month diploma course at Le Cordon Bleu, London.
Was the plan always to start a cookie shop? “I had no idea about the cookies. I actually loved a few stores there, which were on the way to my college. The [fragrance] of that place was so inviting, that if you passed it you would walk back to buy a cookie. I had a cookie every day. I had friends who would actually pass the cookie shop and be like, ‘do you want a cookie?’ and I’d be like, ‘I already got mine’. It was just a thing that they associated me with that cookie shop.”
Her Diplôma de Pâtisserie comprised three modules; after the first, Ritika came back to the city for a break. During that trip, “I thought about those cookies all the time. So I tried making them. But I was back only for three months.” This short-lived experiment eventually became the basis for Oh Dough.
Ingredients galoreWhen it comes to Oh Dough’s ingredients, it’s a mix of local and imported elements. While Belgian Callebaut chocolate is locally available via importers, and Ritika makes her own pistachio paste and most other ingredients, the oils and vinegars are imported. Ritika admits, “the Indian chocolates are coming up. We’ve had a tasting of a company and their 70 per cent is getting better.”
Perfecting the recipe and deciding on each flavour took about a year, with Ritika making it a point to try out different types of cookies to please different palates. She says, “We have different types of textures in the shops because everybody’s idea of a cookie is different: some people think they’re cakey, some like chewy, some like them really crispy,” so that took some perfecting too.
Besides cookies, there are also ice creams on the menu. Ritika says it wasn’t something she initially planned to include: “It’s a very last-minute thing,” and were added to the café literally a month before the opening. Pawan, was not too keen on adding ice cream to the menu, suggested that Ritika focus on the cookies, but she thought otherwise. “In Bombay, we don’t have seasons, we have the heat 80 per cent of the year, so we need cold stuff, more than hot desserts,” she says. The gamble has paid off, with the ice creams and cookie pairing taking off with customers.
The talk soon turns to future plans, and Ritika is clear that they’ll only expand if they can maintain the quality of their product. “Even if we do expand it is not going to be before a year, at least,” says Pawan, “We don’t want a guest to come in and say, ‘it wasn’t good today.’”
All the dough is made at a central kitchen in Fort, but baked fresh in the store, ensuring that the fragrance of the cookie dough that enticed Ritika while walking down Tottenham Court Road in London has the same effect on unsuspecting walkers down Allana Marg.
Oh Dough, Hind Rajasthan Chambers, 6 Allana Marg, Kala Ghoda, opposite Burma Burma, Fort; 22631313. Cookies start at Rs. 85 and ice cream scoops at Rs. 125
The author is a freelance writer
