Cookbook author, ex-MOB presenter and TikTok hit Seema Pankhania is one of the nation’s favourite food creators. You may know her as ‘Seema Gets Baked’, with a cult following of over one million people, eagerly awaiting her next vibrant, moreish recipe. We sat down with her to discuss her journey into the culinary world, from her time as a kitchen porter to working at Gordon Ramsay’s Lucky Cat restaurant. Today, she’s on a mammoth quest to re-create the national dish of every country in the world and reveals the one that really took her by surprise.
“I worked as a kitchen porter for six months, all I could get was washing dishes.”
Seema always wanted to cook, but with the hefty prices of cooking schools and lack of payment schemes, she knew she’d have to go about it a different way. She went to Manchester university to study neuroscience and applied for Bake Off. She got to the stage before TV but that was where her journey came to an end. The silver lining to this cloud for Seema was the realisation just how much she wanted her career to be in food and today, she’s happy with the path it led her down.
“What I wanted to do was work in something like Bon Appetit. So I stalked all the people that work at Bon Appetit when they were big on their YouTube channel days and I saw what their route was to do it.” She noticed they all seemed to work in a restaurant for a few years, however, Seema admits it’s very hard to get a restaurant job with no experience. Desperate for a way in, she settled with a job as a kitchen porter while she finished her studies. Once she graduated, she lined up five consecutive days of kitchen trials, putting the one she really wanted last so she could use the others as experience. Her plan worked, and the following Monday she began her stint at Lucky Cat. However, her first experience working in a male-dominated, professional kitchen was a little tougher than she expected.
“I was the youngest there, I was one of the only three women. I was also one of two people of colour. It was definitely very hard, very draining.”
The cold, cut-throat environment meant Seema's personal life suffered. Asking for time off usually fell on deaf ears, and as a result she found herself missing major family occasions. Today, there is a part of her that wishes she worked at one of the many female-led restaurants such as Rochelle Canteen and Darjeeling Express, known to be more warm, friendly kitchens. However, Seema thinks that today, the typical professional kitchen is evolving.
“Now, especially because people don't want to work in hospitality, it's forcing hospitality to be kinder… Especially the younger generation, they're not dealing with that. If someone's going to shout at you, they're just going to walk out."
“I was quite scared to write my own cookbook and initially didn’t love the idea of it…”
Seema needed some convincing to write her cookbook, Craveable: All I Want to Eat. After some persuasion from her agents, she started the process and to her surprise, ended up loving it. Not only did it open her up to developing entirely new recipes, ones that weren’t designed to go viral on social media, but Seema threw herself into the design side of things, too. “I got a clothes stylist so even my clothes fit the theme. If it was like comforting soups, I’m wearing jumpers, it was a bit fresh, it was summery clothes. Each picture had a whole story behind it.”
“If you want to make something taste good, just add it in.”
“My mum, she doesn't have the knowledge of this ingredient is from this country, this ingredient goes in this cuisine. So the way she cooks it, she just adds it all together and makes it taste good.” Seema says this is the red thread throughout her cookbook, it’s not about following strict rules. In fact, she even added in substitutes to the ingredients, so “if you don't have anchovies, you can add, say, soy sauce. It adds that umami saltiness and things like that.” One recipe inspired by her mum is a spicy egg McMuffin. “My mum always makes spicy Indian scrambled eggs. I put it in an egg McMuffin with bacon and chilli tomatoes and ketchup. And it's such a good breakfast food. It's so delicious.”
“Do you know when you have a sandwich in your bag and it gets a bit squished and it tastes even better? Yeah, it's kind of like that, but in a cake.”
“My boyfriend is Swedish, and he always brings out these dishes that are so strange. And they have this cake called a Smörgåstårta in Sweden, which is layers of white bread with prawns, cream cheese, cucumbers. It's savoury, but it looks like a cake and you ice it like a cake in terms of you put cream cheese over it, but it's not sweet. I thought it was crazy, and I tried it and it was so good because the bread pieces get kind of soft… do you know when you have a sandwich in your bag and it gets a bit squished and it tastes even better? Yeah, it's kind of like that, but in a cake.”
The Smörgåstårta combined with the Japanese Fruit Sando is the inspiration behind Seema’s 30 minute birthday cake, a recipe in the book that’s the ultimate saviour for a last-minute gifters. Seema admits she herself uses this recipe every time, and it’s always a crowd pleaser. “Your friends won’t forget things like that. But they'll forget a shop-bought cake.”
“I remember when I made it, my friends were planning to go on a night out and everything smelt like vinegar…”
Seema’s university was near a large Asian supermarket, and during study breaks, she would go in and browse through the aisles, picking random ingredients to try and figure out how they work. This is what led Seema to discovering Chicken Adobo, the national dish of The Philippines. “It's a delicious dish, it's basically just chicken, bay leaves, black peppercorns, a cup of soy sauce, and a cup of vinegar. When you cook it, the whole house reeks of vinegar… but then it cooks down and it gets really savoury and a bit sour, a bit sweet.” It was Chicken Adobo that inspired Seema to delve into the national dishes of the other countries, and from there, began her quest to re-create every national dish, one that has since garnered much attention on TikTok.
“It’s flavours that I wouldn't have put together, and it’s really, really, good.”
Salt fish and ackee, Jamaica’s national dish, was one that Seema found particularly surprising. Salt fish is typically cod, and comes in a little plastic box. “Every time I saw it, I was like, unrefrigerated fish… covered with salt… Gross.” Ackee, on the other hand, looks like an apricot but has a texture of an avocado, and comes in a tin. According to Seema, after rinsing the salt fish “it kind of acts like bacon. It's salty and savoury paired with the creamy ackee, and it has like some scotch bonnets in it. And it's just so delicious and really unusual.”
“It’s probably one of the most popular Indian desserts there is…”
One of Seema’s recipes that performed particularly well was Gulab Jamun, garnering over one million views. Seema puts its success down to three main reasons, the first because for those who haven’t heard of it, it looks “really juicy and syrupy and very more-ish.” And those who have, know it’s not an easy recipe to make. “Usually, when you make it, you need a lot of special ingredients, and it's quite difficult to get the correct sponginess.. And the third reason is how my mom makes it so easy, she adds egg into it. And a lot of Indian people don't eat egg in Diwali…” However, when it comes down to it, Seema essentially shared a hack with the world. She transformed a recipe that is notoriously difficult into one that is accessible.
“It’s done a really good job of keeping its roots…”
Seema’s go-to restaurants in London include Fat Punditt, an Indo Chinese restaurant and Kolae, a Thai restaurant, but for a fantastic Indian meal, she looks no further than Darjeeling Express and Dishoom. which she credits for making quality, good Indian food accessible. “And I think it's done a really good job of keeping its roots because things like the drinks, the decor, the restaurant, and the colours, it looks really authentically Indian without being too westernized and trying to be something it's not.”
“All I would watch was Food Network…”
When Seema was thirteen years old, she was diagnosed with cancer. With a year off school, she turned to cooking channels for entertainment, admittedly the only daytime television she could tolerate. “I was watching Ina Garten… I'm the Pioneer Woman’s biggest fan. I used to read her blogs every night before bed. I’d memorize her recipes. I was just so obsessed with her in her little cottage and her kids and her farm, and her beautiful red hair. It was just amazing. I think the Food Network shows are what actually got me so obsessed with food because it's it made it seem really easy and accessible. And the website was just it was quite easy to get to. And I would just watch it all day, nonstop. It was amazing.”
Seema's cookbook, Craveable, is available to purchase today on Amazon.
