Umami From Scratch takes the spice road to the next Monday Night Foodball

Divs Ray was too young to remember the French baking classes her mother, Manasi, taught in the remote northwestern Indian steel town of Rourkela.

And yet Ray’s guava gochugaru pâte à choux somehow embodies the improvisational style of her mother, who had no problems experimenting with alternatives in a town not well provisioned with the traditional ingredients of French pastry.

“My mom was very flexible,” says Ray, proprietor of the minibakery Umami From Scratch. “She was like, ‘Whatever is available is available. Make the most of it. We can make it another way and make it more interesting.’”

“Say a Black Forest gateau needed to be served for a dinner party but there are no cherries or kirsch,” Ray says. “She made a ginger orange marmalade for filling and ginger syrup for the soak. It’s not Black Forest gateau anymore. But who cares? The guests have never been abroad and don’t know about that German cake anyway. Back in the day, she used to stuff medjool dates with nuts and toasted vermicelli, then dip them in peanut butter and chocolate. She was fearless.”

For lack of demand, her mother, a professor of home economics, gave up on the private classes when Ray was a toddler. But she continued baking and cooking enthusiastically—experimentally—for friends and family. “There were no fixed rules in her kitchen,” says Ray, and she was not bound by the rigidity of traditional Indian cuisine. The family traveled frequently, always eating local food, which fed her inspiration. She never prepared the same thing twice.

Not that it mattered much to Ray, who wrote that she “grew up as a strange child who disliked eating and food in general.” She was focused on school and writing, acting, and directing plays and choreographing musicals with her friends in local drama clubs.

Still, as a ten-year-old latchkey kid, she had already absorbed some of her mother’s instincts. “I always cooked instant ramen in leftover dal or rasam instead of water for a more flavorful result, saved a handful of raw noodles and crumbled them with the packet seasoning, and mixed [in] cilantro and lime.” But, “It was necessity. I was never actively into cooking or baking for most of my formative years.”

It wasn’t until 2011, when she married her husband, Anshuman Acharya, and discovered they shared a love of pasta and East Asian food, that she began to cook, with him as an occasional backup. She took to it right away.

Umami From Scratch at Monday Night Foodball
Mon 6/23 at 6 PM, Frank and Mary’s Tavern, 2905 N. Elston
umamifromscratch.com, @umamifromscratch
chicagoreader.com/food/monday-night-foodball, @frankandmarystavern

“I was like, ‘OK, we gotta do it,’” she says, and attributes her immediate natural ability to the unconscious influence of her mother. “I felt like one of those people who are good at math, and two hours of studies is enough, and they can ace the test. I felt something similar [in] cooking. Everything seemed very natural and instinctive. And how did that happen? ‘Subconscious’ is the word that I use.”

In 2015, when she and Acharya arrived in the city to attend graduate school at the University of Chicago—public policy and business, respectively—she got into bread baking, once again inspired by her mother. But she didn’t have much time to pursue it.

Two years later, she discovered her second great inspiration when she was given a copy of the Israeli British chef Yotam Ottolenghi’s Jerusalem: A Cookbook, coauthored with his Palestinian chef–partner Sami Tamimi.

Ray was enamored with Ottolenghi’s vegetable-forward dishes and the “excessiveness” of his plating—the texturing, layering, and vivid coloring, and the innovative flavor profiles that draw on ingredients from all over the world, not just the Mediterranean. She also appreciated his equitability in crediting the cooks and chefs that work for him, especially women and people of color.

Sweet potato chaat galettes garnished with pomegranate seeds, cilantro, and an herb sauce of cilantro, chives, scallions, cumin, chili, and lemon
Credit: Kirk Williamson

During COVID lockdown, Ray and Acharya began an involved Friday night ritual, eating an elaborate mezze spread of six to eight dishes, of which she would post images on her private Instagram just for friends: say, harissa-spiced ratatouille, baharat-spiced mushrooms in tarragon cream, preserved lemon, roasted asparagus, marinated feta, and orange blossom radicchio and orange salad.

Ray says she never stopped exploring the world of Ottolenghi. In 2022 on a trip to London, she visited all eight of his restaurants and delis and ate one of the five best dishes of her life at Rovi: a now signature celeriac shawarma. “It was a dish all-encompassing,” she says. “It was so well-balanced and executed to perfection.”

At the same time, she returned to baking bread and French pastry, plus more subtle, delicate, less sweet Asian pastries after a summer internship in New York City in 2017. That was another revelation. “Growing up in India, I hated all desserts. I still don’t eat any Indian desserts. I feel that people are extremely lazy about it. It’s just around dairy. There are only three flavors: cardamom, saffron, and rose.”

Sumac thyme semolina tea cakes
Credit: Kirk Williamson

“When I moved to America, I found everything too sweet again. Why don’t they use salt? People don’t understand the concept that salt actually brings out the flavors, and the sugar actually overpowers the flavors. Exploring Asian patisserie—Japanese bakeries, Korean bakeries—that’s what opened my mind. You can actually enjoy dessert and not have a sugar blast in your face and still taste the flavors.”

For her Instagram recipes, she gradually began incorporating the flavors of the spice routes—the historic, maritime tradeways that linked Japan, Indonesia, India, the Middle East, and Europe, spreading cinnamon, nutmeg, cardamom, clove, ginger, tea, pepper, star anise, and other flavors all over the world.

Channeling her mother, she’d often pair ingredients in unusual ways, like miso sweet potato chocolate custard bars instead of a traditional sweet potato pie for Thanksgiving.

She gradually began incorporating the flavors of the spice routes—the historic, maritime tradeways that linked Japan, Indonesia, India, the Middle East, and Europe.

Ray wasn’t yet thinking about baking as a moneymaking venture, but in September 2020 she decided to make her account public, for recipe and concept sharing and as a way to document her self-taught journey.

Her husband came up with the handle @umamifromscratch: “He kept saying that with everything I would create, there was something mysterious about it, and he couldn’t put his finger on it. ‘This feels so different and so delicious, but I don’t know why,’ he said. As the least understood and mysterious of the five basic tastes, ‘maybe you should use something like [umami].’”

Over the years she became more adventurous. She started with madeleines, the scallop-shaped French sponge cakes: blood orange and cardamom; a savory cornmeal version with onions, chives, and gochugaru; and an Old Fashioned madeleine with chocolate bitters, whiskey, and whiskey-orange syrup.

She baked everything from nectarine focaccia with fennel and chili glaze, to tapioca fritters with orange syrup and star anise, to kimchi-brioche bread pudding with chives and sesame salsa—everything vegetarian, never too sweet, and always nut free (she has an allergy).

Meanwhile, her Instagram following was growing. Ray held her first bake sale in 2021, an online presale and pickup from her home during which she sold out of everything: 72 tangerine oolong tea, Turkish coffee, and Earl Grey–lavender madeleines; 15 cardamom and ginger–spiced tea loaves; and 36 za’atar and fresh oregano milk buns stuffed with herbs, feta, and halloumi.

Tomatoes, peaches, and crumpets with wasabi mascarpone
Credit: Divs Ray

She was also baking tea parties for friends, and friends of friends, but her first big break came when she was invited to contribute to the third annual Over the Moon – Chicago online bake sale in the fall of 2023: a curated collection of a dozen mooncakes created by Asian American bakers to celebrate the Chinese Mid-Autumn Festival.

Her ginger-infused pastry skin, filled with Okinawan purple sweet potato and white miso, resonated with organizer Anna Desai, who connected her to serial entrepreneur and Side Practice Coffee owner Francis Almeda (Kanin, Del Sur Bakery, Novel Pizza). That led to her first real pop-up the following month.

Side Practice was already an incubator for the post-COVID pop-up explosion, with an established community of regulars that began lining up at 7:30 AM for her saffron madeleines with Amaretto glaze, black garlic miso focaccia, and Baharat-spice cauliflower minicakes with tomato chutney. She sold out in two hours.

“Whenever I would talk about my concept, at the tea parties, or the catering I would do for friends, every single time I would be asked, ‘What is umami? You are not Japanese. Why aren’t you doing Indian food? What is cardamom? What is black garlic? I’m so confused.’ But that moment at Side Practice, people knew. Like, ‘We get you. We understand.’ I felt like these were my people.”

Since then, she’s tried to do one pop-up each month and launched occasional website bake sales for presale and pickup outside her Streeterville home.

Last week she dropped a ten-piece Pride box, featuring a sumac-thyme semolina tea cake, gochujang plum focaccia, and char siu eggplant milk buns, among others. (It sold out.) Ray figures the LGBTQ+ community are her biggest supporters, making up some 70 to 75 percent of her most regular customers. “They’re just more adventurous and fearless in general. So that’s probably why they don’t shy away from trying new things.” Among ethnicities, it’s East Asian, 85 percent, mostly Korean and Chinese.

“It’s a one-person, one-mixer, one-oven operation.”

Oddly enough, Ray says her work doesn’t seem to resonate with South Asians. “I’m very thrilled about all the amazing fusion happening with South Asian cuisine worldwide. I love what Indienne and Mirra are doing. However, I think as a community most South Asians aren’t very open to new, inventive flavors, and [would] rather seek familiarity and nostalgia. I used to get requests—gulab jamun cheesecake, mango mousse. They just assume that you’re Indian, you must have mango juice in your veins. I’ve never had chai in my life.” (Though she does incorporate it into a few pastries.)

Ray works out of her own home kitchen under a cottage food license. “It’s a one-person, one-mixer, one-oven operation,” she says, though she’s currently seeking out a commercial kitchen to increase volume. She still works a full-time day job in corporate finance, but eventually she hopes to open a brick-and-mortar bakery. “My training in finance has always told me that there is no money in a food business. But there is joy. After pulling all-nighters, consistently being on my feet for 48 hours, the joy I see in the faces of people when they are discovering a flavor combination or item that they had never thought of before—that just makes up for it.”

Since that first pop-up in late 2023, Ray’s done 21 in total, though all but one of them have taken place in the evening. That all changes this June 23 when Umami From Scratch bakes for the next Monday Night Foodball, the Reader’s weekly chef pop-up at Frank and Mary’s Tavern in Avondale.

She’s designed a banger of a menu to alleviate possible sweaty temperatures, with starters such as tomatoes, peaches, and crumpets with wasabi mascarpone. “This is a funky Japanese Italian fusion,” says Ray. “It takes a classic Italian agrodolce—refreshing and sweet tomatoes and peaches are marinated in white wine vinegar and Italian sweet basil—with splashes of Japanese tamari and toasted sesame oil.”

She’s frying gochujang tots with charred corn slaw, “because one of the top ingredients that imparts umami in one stroke is gochujang. It’s savory, spicy, sweet, bitter, and full of depth. Paired with crispy tots and creamy corn coleslaw, this bowl is my true homage to my love for all things Korean.”

Black garlic shokupan with watermelon gazpacho
Credit: Divs Ray

And there’s the black garlic shokupan with watermelon gazpacho: feather-light Hokkaido-style milk bread with layers of black garlic and miso butter, rolled into a miniloaf to dip in a side of cool watermelon gazpacho.

She’s riffing on an item from her recent Pride box, a harissa sweet potato galette with orange blossom fennel salad. It’s “flaky polenta pastry slathered with a black cardamom and lime ricotta filling, topped with roasted sweet potato, then finished with a sticky harissa honey glaze and caraway and nigella seed. Served along with a zingy fennel, pomegranate, and feta salad perfumed with orange blossom water.”

Pandan coffee pudding with toasted coconut meringue
Credit: Divs Ray

And then come the (subtle) sweets: a pandan coffee pudding with toasted coconut meringue. Strong arabica coffee and vanilla-like pandan leaf pudding are topped with toasted coconut French meringue, spiced coconut chips, and coffee syrup.

And finally, there’s the sumac strawberry labneh shortcakes, “amped with sumac then stuffed with a fresh strawberry-mint compote and dollops of rosewater-infused labneh cream.”

“People ask me,” she says. “‘How do you pair flavors? I would have never thought of combining these two things.’ I don’t have a solid answer to that, mostly because it comes very instinctively to me. I do get ideas in the middle of the night, and I’ll have a scribble pad next to me, and I will write it down. And then I will not rest until I have tested out this weird combination that came to my mind.”

Ray’s pop-ups are typically pick-up only, but this is Monday Night Foodball. Stay. Have a drink. Eat your pastries and meet Divs Ray. She’d love to know what you think.

Get on the spice road with Umami from Scratch this Monday, June 23, from 6 PM until sellout at 2905 N. Elston in Avondale.

Meanwhile, check out the full summer Foodball schedule.