About the Home Cooking Collective
Home Cooking Collective is a community centered around technique-based cooking. A place where home cooks can learn everything from balancing flavors to making curries to hand-forming pasta through guides, workshops, and recipes.
Welcome! I’m Karishma, and I founded the Home Cooking Collective, a community centered around technique-based cooking. So many of my friends ask me how cooking comes so naturally to me, but, in truth, it took a lot of trial and error.
When I first started cooking 15 years ago, I would follow recipes to the letter; in doing so, I mostly saw success, but there were some flops, too. If I veered away from a recipe or ventured out on my own, I would see failure after failure. Time and time again, I wondered what had happened. Why did my cake sink in the middle? Why did my curry taste unbalanced? Why did my eggs stick to the pan? Eventually, after cooking enough meals, I started observing similarities in techniques between recipes within and across cuisines. More importantly, after establishing these fundamentals, I could cook dishes on my own, without a recipe.
Think about how many cookbooks exist in this world and how many truly teach you how to cook, the ones that aren’t just a collection of recipes; there is only a handful. Don’t get me wrong, I love following recipes — and I have plenty of them on my blog! But recipes can’t tell you everything. So many outside factors can impact the final dish even if you follow everything to the letter, like temperature, ingredients, or equipment.
With the right techniques, though, you’re set up for success – whether you’re developing your own recipe or following someone else’s. Cooking then becomes more about experimenting with what you have in the fridge, substituting shallots for onions or sweet potatoes in gnocchi. And unlike me, you don’t need to spend years developing those techniques because I’ve consolidated them all into one space: the Home Cooking Collective.
Ready to get started? Start here!
About Karishma
Growing up, I always loved to cook but only ever thought of it as a hobby. My interest ebbed and flowed between the ages of 12 and 22. In college, after moving into an apartment with a kitchen, I furiously cooked almost every meal, whipping up a batch of chicken tikka masala during finals or bacon egg and cheese sandwiches before a morning printmaking class. Eventually, I started Tang and Spice, a food blog documenting my efforts. I enjoyed it for a couple of years, then chose to step away from food blogging to limit my use of technology and social media.
However, in 2020, I decided to start it up again after realizing food, cooking, and recipe development are and always will be a significant part of my life. So, I quit my full-time job in analytics and began consulting — allowing me the flexibility to focus on my interest in food on the side. Eventually, I transitioned into the food industry full-time. Now, I run the Home Cooking Collective and provide freelance recipe development and food photography services. I have also written for various publications, such as Taste Cooking and Simply Recipes. Take a look at my complete portfolio here.