Welcome!
My name is Jiwan and by day, I’m a researcher studying clinical psychology and neuroscience. My research employs various neuroimaging techniques to study brain development in Autism Spectrum Disorders. If you’re interested in knowing more about that part of my life, you should check out my other website. By night, I use a minority of my spare time to dabble in photography, and the majority of it on culinary pursuits to photograph.
My passion for creating food comes from my mother, as does the desire to feed anyone and everyone. She taught me the value of doing something from scratch, without taking shortcuts that compromise the integrity of a final product, and it's her magnanimous spirit that I strive to emulate. I often get asked about how I got my start in baking though, and while some of my earliest memories are of helping her with whatever delicious meal she was cooking up, baking was my first truly independent culinary pursuit. And that’s how the bearded baker was born, although the beard took a while to kick in.
I’ve had no formal training, just an ever-increasing library of culinary books and the vast chambers of the internet. My approach toward food is, unsurprisingly, that of a scientist. I love learning about the chemical reactions that drive the textures and flavors of good food. I make hypotheses about changes toward improvement. Every recipe is an experiment. I often run many permutations on the same dish, with failures that that live in my freezer for me to slowly digest the lessons learned. Sometimes I have exciting new results to share, and that’s where this website found its origin.