The Posdol Blog
POSDOL came from this idea: a pinch of salt and a dash of lime are what make all the difference to any dish. Not the protein, not the technique — the small things. This blog is about those small things. The specific version, for people who are actually building something in food.
A chef at IHM taught me a ratio I have never forgotten. Four parts spinach, two parts coriander, one part mint, half a part green chilli. Not a recipe. A ratio. Which means it works at any scale, any quantity, any day. The aloo palak built on that ratio — with the story behind it.
Lemonade wins summer by default. These five beat it on merit: neer mor, aam panna, nannari, watermelon-mint and kokum, with the one rule that makes each of them work.
Fennel, melon seeds, pepper and almonds ground into the most sophisticated milk drink in the country. The concentrate method that turns a festival recipe into a weekday one.
Raw mango, jaggery, black salt and roasted cumin. North India's original heatstroke defence, and the salt-sugar-fluid logic behind the tradition holds up.
Tamil Nadu hands out spiced buttermilk free during the hottest fortnight of the year. Fluid, sodium, live cultures and protein for about 25 rupees a litre.
Almond gum, reduced milk, sarsaparilla syrup, ice cream. The famous Madurai drink as a faithful 4-component home build, and why you must never blend it.
Sarsaparilla root, sugar, lime and salt. South India's original soft drink, made from actual roots with one overnight soak and 20 minutes at the stove.
One is cold pleasure, the other is breakfast with a job. Two mango drinks, two techniques, and the ice cube mistake that quietly ruins both.
40g of spinach, 200g of frozen fruit, ginger, lime, and the greens-first blending order. The ratio that fixes the green smoothie's well-earned reputation.
Fourteen grams of protein, real satiety, one minute of effort, about 30 rupees. The most honest fast breakfast in the country, with the peanut butter economics nobody runs.
Strong chilled decoction, cold full-fat milk, restrained sugar, a foam collar. The blended cold coffee that predates the chains, ice excluded on principle.
Real rose petal syrup takes 15 minutes and beats every synthetic bottle on the shelf. With the sabja seed detail the old shops never skipped.
Foam on top, water below, pulp at the bottom. The separation is physics and the fix is technique: five pulses, salt, lime, and ice in the glass, never the jug.
One is dessert with a probiotic alibi, the other is the most useful hot-weather drink dairy has produced. Both techniques, and why the whisk beats the blender.
The Konkan coast survives its humidity on a dried purple fruit most of India has never tasted as a drink. Garnet red, sweet-sour-saline, built for the worst weeks of summer.
Roasted gram flour, cold water, salt, lime. Twenty percent protein at a tenth of the supplement price, and it fuelled field work long before shaker bottles existed.
Every Indian grandmother prescribed it for heat and water troubles. The beta-glucan research caught up decades later. The proper method, zero waste included.
Soft rice, warm milk, cool before the curd goes in, temper always. Four rules separate temple-grade thayir sadam from wet rice with curd on it.
Soaked moong, cucumber, coconut, and a hot tempering poured over cold vegetables. Karnataka solved the salad centuries ago and never bothered to market it.
The street cart fruit chaat is an engineered dish: black salt chemistry, three-texture architecture, the 5 minute rest. The rules, written down at last.
Up to 1.5 litres an hour, about 1g of salt per litre. What an Indian summer takes out of you, why plain water sometimes fails, and what the traditional drinks got right.
Most early-stage operators review financials monthly. By the time the bank account tells the story, the window to correct it is already closed. What daily P&L tracking actually looks like in a small kitchen.
The same meal, two different bodies, two different outcomes. Preventive genomics is making personalised nutrition specific enough to be useful. What we actually know — and what we do not.
Fast food chains achieve their cost structure through volume. Full-service restaurants justify their margins through experience. A small, independent QSR has access to neither advantage. This is a structural problem.
Some recipes teach technique. Some teach patience. This one teaches both. The correct quantity of ghee in sambar is always slightly more than you think it should be.
Eight items. The temptation to expand the menu after the first few weeks is real and almost always wrong. Expansion before the core menu is operationally solid is where most QSR concepts begin unravelling.
1 March 2003. The match was on. Spinach, peas, potato, green chilli — bound by the starch in the potato alone. No cornflour, no bread. The ratio that makes this work every time.
In Mumbai you make onion pakoras when the monsoon hits. In Chennai you make plantain bajji. Same instinct, different logic. Two recipes, two cities, the exact batter ratio for both.
Lumpy, cold, undermixed. The IHM practical that explained why most restaurant tempura doesn't get the crunch right — and the technique that fixes it.
The potato cooks in the oil first, slow and patient, until it absorbs enough fat to hold the egg without fighting it. Made for my brother. The tortilla that became the one I always come back to.
You don't need a tandoor. A tawa, a piece of coal, and thirty seconds. The technique from Calypso Restaurant, Navi Mumbai — and why it works better than most tandoor versions anyway.
A small cup. Yam and raw banana in a thick coconut-yogurt gravy, ten rupees outside school in Chennai. I spent twenty years trying to replicate it. This is the version that finally got close.
Fragrant, mildly sweet, fruit and nuts in the pilaf — but done without tipping into dessert territory. Learning this from Chef Senthil was a lesson in restraint as much as technique.
Power out for two days. This is the khichdi made by candlelight with what was left in the house — and why that version tasted better than any carefully planned meal before or since.
He was not fast. He had learned where not to waste energy. The phulka that taught me how repetition becomes technique — plus the vinegar salad that goes alongside.
Only in Tamil Nadu. Only in summer. Only with raw mango so sour it makes your jaw work. The version that appears once a year and disappears before you think to write it down. Written down now.
Coconut chicken curry, mushroom ghee roast, jeera rice. Not every Sunday — the Sundays that count. Three recipes that have to be made together, because each one changes how the others taste.
Bhetki kalia, musur dal, kancha aamer chatni. A Bengali fish curry made serious. The river fish that holds its shape in a thick, spiced gravy — from a home kitchen in Kolkata, not a restaurant.
Not the egg-dipped bread version. The one where the custard soaks all the way in and the crust caramelises properly. Chef Senthil's recipe from the cloud kitchen on OMR — the one worth learning.
100% platform dependency means 100% exposure to policy changes, commission adjustments, and algorithm shifts. No direct customer relationship. This is the structural weakness that is difficult to resolve.
What this blog covers
Every post falls into one of these five areas. The writing comes from operator experience, not from reading about it.
Recipes
Real recipes. With the memory behind them, the technique that matters, and the ratio worth memorising.
Operator Reality
Cloud kitchen economics, menu engineering, vendor management, kitchen systems, P&L. The specific, not the general.
Food Science
Applied nutrition, ingredient function, nutrigenomics. What food does in the body, explained by someone who cooks it.
Building & Closing
Yellow Door, Seoul Sandwich, what the work taught. The decisions that most founder content skips over.
The Long Game
Personal systems, health as operations, the pattern-finding approach to building things. The philosophy behind the work.
Get it in your inbox
Recipes, food operations, and the science of what we eat. For the person building something, not the person reading about building something.
Also on:
Working on a food business?
I will tell you honestly whether there is something here that is useful to you.