Around Seychelles in 12 days

Catch up with Chef Ranveer Brar’s travels as he shares culinary secrets from the African archipelago through the second season of his Twitter show

May 23, 2017 07:52 pm | Updated 07:52 pm IST

“Did you know, in Seychelles, there are five women to every man. So, it is literally women running the country,” says celebrity chef Ranveer Brar sharing an interesting nugget about the tropical country comprising 115 islands.

Starting this Thursday, Twitter India will launch the second season of #RanveerOntheRoad, capturing Seychelle’s culinary traditions and culture through the chefs travel and food experiences. “When people talk of Seychelles, they talk about the beaches and beauty. Through #RanveerOnTheRoad, we’re trying to bring alive the culture of the place and intrigue potential travellers through video and conversation on the platform,” says Brar. The series will feature 15 videos, with a duration of three minutes each – that will range from covering a restaurant Bonbon plume on Anse Lazio Beach named after its French chef to exploring Curieuse Island.

“We’ve tried to cover various aspects of Seychelles through food, lifestyle and rituals,” says Brar, adding that the concept of Seychellois Creole cuisine, is a combination of European French and native African cuisine, particularly famous in the archipelago of Maldives, Mauritius, Seychelles, and Madagascar.

The first season of the short-form native Twitter video series, #RanveerOnTheRoad, featured Chef Ranveer’s journey through Australia. His follower base has grown nearly four times since the first series launch to over 1.3 million followers on Twitter since. Keya Madhvani, head of music and lifestyle partnerships, Twitter India, tells us over a phone call from the US, “The success of #RanveerOnTheRoad Season 1 prompted the conversation around Seychelles. It created an opportunity for us to look at video along with food on Twitter, in a way that hadn’t happened before. The real success was that it sparked a new kind of format, as a short and episodic, food and video travel series on Twitter, which was a first in India,” To underscore this with numbers, there are more than five million mentions of “travel” on Twitter every month and more than 10 million mentions of “food”.

To be aired at 11 a.m. every Tuesday and Thursday, the three-minute video stories will follow Brar as he interacts with the oldest Indian family in Seychelles, watches a 380-year-old turtle lay eggs and comes across the biggest fruit in the world, coco de mer. “It weighs 60 kilos and the Seychelles Tourism Board were kind enough help me carry the fruit back,” Brar shares.

Coco de mer is like a coconut, but you can’t cook with it unlike a coconut. “But we cooked some traditional breadfruit recipes. Usually, Indians use it to cook like a vegetable or fry it into chips. But, the Seychellois toss the entire fruit into the fire and roast it. Then, you scoop it out and eat it with coconut oil and sugar. Their version of coconut jaggery was a delicious addition to the food too,” elaborates Brar, adding that he devoured the tropical country’s mouth-watering tropical fruits like mangoes, golden apples, and soursop often used in Seychellois food.

Jock fish and octopus salad were on the list of dishes chef tried his hand at. “The most amazing things we cooked was with the fruit dak, a fruit dak curry and a parfait. Interestingly, the spices are similar to India. They use a lot of cinnamon leaves, and even wrap butter in it. This was my [biggest] takeaway from my trip. [And] I have been using it in my cooking it since,” says Brar, who is already planning the third season of his show. Come June, Brar will pack his bags for Turkey to shoot the third season of #ranveerontheroad.

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