Rejoining a commercial kitchen and attempting to make my paste in bulk!

A little update as I go back to Mission Kitchen and get my business rolling again

Hello everyone!

This week, I moved back into a commercial kitchen after spending several months trying, and failing, to make my Goan Curry Paste at home. It’s a decision I’ve ummed and ahhed about for a while because I didn’t want to make a huge financial commitment prematurely. But the reality is, with domestic-sized pots and blenders, I would never have been able to test a scaled up version of my recipe properly.

Blending just 5–10 jars at a time in my Thermomix wasn’t sustainable, even for sending out product samples, let alone producing enough to actually sell. And more than that, being in a commercial setting brings with it a whole mental shift. In just five days, I’ve already felt a huge surge in productivity. There’s more impetus to put my full energy into the business when I’m surrounded by other food businesses all day and when Ive actually paid for kitchen hours that I must use!

The kitchen I’ve joined is Mission Kitchen in Nine Elms (an area of South London for those international amongst you). When I first started Yesterday’s Curry at the end of 2021, I moved into Mission Kitchen in February 2022 and was working there for a year making my dry spice blends (who remembers those?!) It was a great place to start my business and helped me scale from 50 packets of spice to 2000+ tins. The business resources, community and equipment helped me to launch into Selfridges and so it was a no brainer that If I ever needed a professional kitchen again, this is where I’d return.

I’ve initially signed up for a 3 month period, though I anticipate this will extend as I’ve already lost a couple of weeks due to ill health and private chef jobs cropping up! My objective, however long I stay, will be the same. I need to see if I am able to produce my Goan Curry Paste myself in bulk without needing to outsource it to a co-manufacturer or factory. When I was making dry spice blends, the process was easy. There were no issues with shelf life and dry products are just much more texturally uniform and less messy. During my home trials of the curry paste, I’ve already seen how wildly different two batches can be, even when they follow the same recipe. One day your onions retain more moisture, and suddenly the total weight is off. The coconut might be drier than expected, which affects the texture. You have to weigh the paste before seasoning it, otherwise your salt ratio could be way off once the paste has cooked down and decreased in volume. There’s just so much more that goes into it, which is of course part of the fun and I enjoy the process of perfecting my recipe and method, but it also means it takes longer to get a product like this to market.

The next few months I will be testing various blending methods; Thermomix, stick blender, stone grinder, and maybe even a combination of these. I’ll be comparing fresh coconut and desiccated, tamarind concentrate and tamarind block, the addition of tomato or not. These little decisions shape the entire product.

So, in many ways, this is where the journey really starts.

For those of you who signed up to be product sample testers — thank you again. I’ll be in touch soon to collect delivery details, as I’m hoping to have some early test pots ready by June/July. That’s the plan, anyway.

A preview of things to come!

You can follow along on Instagram for regular kitchen updates, and of course I’ll continue sharing bigger milestones here on Substack.

Before I go - a special birthday shoutout to my dear friend Mervyn, who turns 96 today! A lot of you here are big Mervyn fans and have read previous pieces about him, so please join me in wishing him the happiest birthday.

Below, you can read his wonderful article in African Newspaper Daily Nation, about how to stay positive in old age - it’s a great and important read.

Bye for now
Emma x

To follow along on instagram:

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