Our Story

My love of, and education about Spices, began at the age of 12 when my father opened a grocery store in 1968.

My teachers, taught me about Spices, are experts in their fields.  Aunties, mothers, and grandmothers, they were the customers that would visit our shop, I was a school kid helping in the family business. Talking to the customers, identifying various spices, and learning their uses, was fascinating and interested me.

At the age of 14 my mother was taken ill, when it came to food, we had to learn to cook for ourselves.

Initially food was beans, pilchards, and canned mix vegetables on toast. Once a week my father would cook a large pot of watery chicken curry. The pot would stay on the stove-top for a few days and you helped yourself, heat it up in the frying pan and eat it with, guess what, bread!

Back in the days…

Back in the early 70’s there were no readymade pitta or naan breads and no internet for YouTube videos to show us what to do and we were getting tiresome of eating the same bland food.

My elder brother and I decided to get in the kitchen and cook, hoping for something better and tastier. Dad was smart, he walked out saying “Boys the kitchen is yours!”. Through trial and error and experimenting, with quite a few disasters along the way and asking aunties question on how to do things, forgetting the instructions by the time we got to kitchen, we “graduated” – we learnt how to cook!

We became experts in many varieties of chicken, lamb, fish, prawns, lentils, vegatables, and more. We no longer needed to endure boring beans, we invented our own dish of “Curried Beans” eaten on toast, with Roti or Chapati’s and it was very tasty.

That passion of cooking and experimenting has stayed with me ever since, perfecting the way spices should be used. I want to share my secrets with you.

A New Venture

Over the years many friends and colleagues have asked me how to make dishes after tasting my food. In the last few months of staying at home due to

the pandemic with nothing much to do, I had lots of these questions as people turned to the kitchen for some comfort. And this led to my “Eureka” moment.

Why don’t I use my knowledge and talent to produce a range of spice mixes and rubs?

So, what to call my new spice mixes and rubs? What could possibly describe them and do them justice? After a lot of soul searching and thinking about how my brother and I first started this cooking journey, I remembered the aunties, keeping the spice true to its nature, and making simple mixes that has the Aroma Taste and Sensation that invokes flavours to make the perfect home cooked meal.

I’ve been told, Indian cooking is so hard, so difficult. The thinking and ethos behind the name is to take away the myth and Naked Indian was born.

Why Naked Indian?

The term naked can have many meanings. For me it means simple, authentic, and true to its origins. I want to show how simple and easy it can be to cook great Indian food – it’s like the Aunties said – keep the spice true to its nature and simple. For me that means keep it Naked!