Why India’s ‘macaron queen’ wrote a health cookbook after building a pastry empire

Pooja Dhingra is accustomed to the sumptuous. A pastry chef and owner of the bakery chain Le 15 Patisserie, she is frequently called the macaron queen of India – her sweet creations have landed her on the covers on magazines and provided her a celebrity clientele that includes Bollywood stars and business tycoons. So it comes as a bit of a surprise, when she confesses her love for lauki, or bottle gourd.

As Dhingra says, if you combine grated lauki with cocoa powder, chocolate, milk, almond powder and a few other deceptively healthy ingredients, you can make a batch of chocolate cookies that taste and look so close to the real thing, that Dhingra christened them “sneaky cookies”.

With only 3 gm of fat per cookie, the lauki-chocolate delights are Dhingra’s favourites from the collection of her recently launched book, The Wholesome Kitchen.

Like both cooking and eating healthy, Dhingra’s new book is a labour of love: she has collaborated and developed each recipe with her sister-in-law, nutritionist Viddhi Dhingra. Pooja brings the indulgence and Viddhi, a healthy balance to each bite. “My first instinct would have been that nuts are high on calories, hence bad, but Viddhi pointed out that they are healthy from a nutritional point of view,” said Dhingra, explaining how their collaboration worked.

Divided into five major sections – Basics, Energize, Nourish, Refresh and Indulge – the recipe book begins with instructions on how to make nut butters, which are used across the recipes which follow. It includes recipes for savoury salads, soups and pastas, but Dhingra’s preference for all things sweet is prominent. “I love eating everything, but anything chocolate is my favourite,” said Dhingra. “The book too reflects that in a way I guess. Almost 70% of the book has sweet recipes.”

For a cool treat, one can whip up a chia pudding falooda, for a more decadent experience there are mock brownies and faux-frosting, and for those who want a clean gluten-free meal, there are salads and smoothies which use vegetables and berries such as avocado, goji, cranberries and spinach. There are also recipes for light salad dressings that will work with most salads. The writers have dedicated an entire chapter explaining how to pick the best leaves, how to wash them, which combinations of greens, seasoning and accents make for the most wholesome bowl of salad.

The two insist you can eat healthy without losing your love for food. Like celebrity-dietician Rujuta Diwekar, they bust common food myths around Indian foods too – parathas, for instance, are not evil. “The whole wheat flour in the paratha is rich in Vitamin B, fibre, calcium and iron,” writes Vidhhi. “The paratha actually provides your body with a whole lot of vitamins, minerals and energy. So when you think of calories, think of how nutritionally dense those calories are before making your meal choices.”

Also making cameos in her book with their own recipes, are Dhingra’s A-list celebrity friends. Readers can sample Alia Bhatt’s favourite sweet potato chaat, Sonam Kapoor’s chocolate hazelnut truffles, Parineeti Chopra’s carrot cake or Masaba Gupta’s Fruity Popsicles.

According to Dhingra, she invited friends and colleagues who shared the same health mantra as her to contribute recipes. “I had long conversations with Masaba Gupta about enjoying desserts without having to worry about sugar, which led to us collaborating on Jump, my line of healthy desserts,” writes Dhingra. “Celebrities... travel the world and have very busy schedules but they still focus on eating right. These fantastic people continue to inspire me every day – they have fun and occasionally indulge themselves but they also pay close attention to their general well-being.”

For the most part, the ingredients used in the recipes include only those that are locally grown, but some, like goji berries and kale, are hard to come by, or tend to be expensive when available.

“Things like bottle gourd and rajma, or red kidney beans, are commonly available in Indian kitchens,” said Dhingra. “Some of the recipes call for almond flour and avocados can be bought online, especially now that India is beginning to produce avocados here. Recipes using avocados will cost more, sure, but there are also recipes like banana pancakes which will cost extremely little to produce at home.”

Also missing are Indian spices and recipes from a book meant for a local audience. “It’s predominantly a baking cook book and while I use ingredients like rajma and chhola in some of them, it’s just not an Indian cookbook,” she said.

The main aim of The Wholesome Kitchen, said Dhingra, is to reiterate that there are ways to make healthier food choices that are also enjoyable.

The book was born of Dhingra’s personal battle with weight. In the introductory chapter, Dhingra writes of being picked on for her weight in school, being told by extended family to lose weight so that she could find a nice man to marry. “I remember going shopping for a pair of jeans with my mother and crying in the changing room because none of the four largest sizes fit me,” she writes. The Wholesome Kitchen is the culmination of Dhingra’s journey from eating butter-laden baguettes and snacking on M&Ms to running a 21km marathon, creating brownies with zucchinis, red velvet desserts with beetroot and substituting refined sugar with honey in her kitchen.

If anything, Dhingra’s confessions reveal something most women already know to be true: that despite wildly successful careers, supportive families and friends, anyone can be plagued with insecurities about their appearance.

The 31-year-old chef arrived on the culinary scene in 2010, fresh from her training as a Le Cordon Bleu chef in Paris, then opened a macaron store in Mumbai. Since then, Dhingra has opened a few more branches of Le 15 Patisserie and published her first book, The Big Book Of Treats, 2014. On his visits to India, celebrity chef Jamie Oliver makes sure he visits Dhingra’s kitchen.

Apart from being a recipe book, The Wholesome Kitchen feels like it is Dhingra’s effort to face those insecurities and banish them altogether – not necessarily by going gluten-free, but through self-love.

Pooja Dhingra’s Sneaky Cookies

Makes 24 cookies

Ingredients

15g ground flaxseeds/flaxseed powder

3tbsp water

150g almond powder

15g cocoa powder

1/2 tsp baking soda

A pinch of salt

100g bottle gourd, peeled, seeded and grated

2 tbsp milk

2 3/4 tbsp coconut oil, melted

60g honey

50g chocolate chips

35g nuts of choice/chopped

Method

1. Preheat the oven to 180 degrees Celsius.
2. Stir the flaxseed powder into the water and set aside to soak for 2-5 minutes.
3. Mix together the almond powder, cocoa powder, baking soda and salt in a bowl.
4. Mix the bottle gourd, soaked flaxseeds, milk, coconut oil and honey in another bowl.
5. Combine the wet and dry ingredients and mix till just combined. The consistency should be mealy.
6. Fold in the chocolate chips and chopped nuts and refrigerate for 15 minutes.
7. Take 1 tablespoon of dough at a time and form into a ball.
8. Place on a baking tray lined with butter paper.
9. Bake the cookies in the centre of the preheated oven for 15-18 minutes.
10. Remove on to a wire rack to cool for before serving.