What this is
Andaza means cooking by estimation. It is how most Pakistani households cook, and it is why so much of that cooking cannot be passed on.
Ask a good home cook how much salt goes into her aloo gosht and she will show you her hand. Ask how long the masala needs and she will say “until it's done.” She is not withholding anything — she genuinely does not hold the information in the form you need. It lives in her hands, and hands cannot be posted to Toronto.
So her daughter, who left, cooks the dish three times and it is wrong three times. Not badly wrong. Just not it. And eventually she stops trying, and one more dish quietly leaves the family.
This archive exists to intercept that. Every recipe here is an act of translation from andaza into grams, minutes and photographs — the transmissible form.
What gets documented
Not restaurant food. Not fusion. Not lighter, faster, air-fried versions of anything. This archive records what is actually cooked in Pakistani houses: the everyday dishes nobody photographs because they are unremarkable, and the regional dishes that have never been written down in English at all.
That means Punjabi and Karachi food, but also Sindhi, Memon, Bohri, Pashtun, Balochi, Kashmiri, Chitrali and Gilgit-Baltistan households — kitchens that between them cover an enormous range and appear almost nowhere in the English-language record.
Some of these dishes are thriving. Some are cooked by a few hundred people and one generation from gone. Every entry says which.
The rules
- Everything is weighed.
- Every solid ingredient has a gram weight. “Salt to taste” appears nowhere on this site. You get a number, then you get told how to move it.
- Everything is cooked twice.
- Once to learn the dish, once to verify that these exact words produce it. No recipe is published from memory or from another recipe.
- Failure is documented.
- What splitting looks like, why the potatoes fell apart, why it tastes flat when the salt is right. Knowing the failure is most of knowing the dish.
- Every dish names its household.
- Community, city and — with permission — the kitchen it was learned in, along with what has changed in one generation. This is the part that makes it an archive.
- Shared dishes are called shared.
- Much of this food has Indian, Afghan, Iranian and Central Asian siblings. Where that's true, the entry says so and says what is actually specific to the Pakistani version.
Who it's for
Anyone who grew up eating this food and now lives somewhere it isn't sold. Anyone who married into it and is cooking for people with fifty years of opinions. And anyone who has cooked their way through the well-documented cuisines and wants one that isn't.
Ingredients are given as you'd find them in an ordinary supermarket, with the South Asian grocer named when there's no way around it, and an honest note on what each substitution costs you.
Contribute a recipe
If your household cooks something that isn't here — particularly if it's regional, particularly if the person who cooks it is the last one who does — please get in touch at hello@andazakitchen.com. Nothing is published without permission, and households can be credited by name or left anonymous.