New Delhi, April 7 -- If you dine at Ground Up, chef Gayatri Desai's ferment-forward restaurant in Pune, chances are you will be offered a tour of her miso room. Desai has amassed around 40 batches of miso, most of which are prepared using indigenous grains and legumes. There's one made from ghevada, a rajma-like bean with a GI tag from Satara district in Maharashtra. The 36-year-old chef wants to familiarise her diners with an ingredient otherwise rooted in Japanese culture, and at the same time make it accessible and approachable for Indian home cooks.

Miso is a fermented soybean paste, and is believed to have originated in ancient China, and been a Japanese staple for over a millenia. It is made of soybean, salt and koji, which is a f...