Forget sports, it’s now our samosas which are bringing home the gold! At the Summer Fancy Food Show at the Jacob Javits Convention Center in New York the 37th Sofi Awards for the outstanding foods and beverages of the year were announced by the National Association for the Specialty Food Trade (NASFT) – and the big winner in the frozen Savory section was Samosas with chutney from Sukhi’s Gourmet Indian Foods based in California. The company is the only Indian-American company to win gold twice, having won last year for its Tikka Masala Sauce in the Outstanding Cooking Sauce category. This year it was a finalist also in the diet and lifestyle category with its Chicken Tikka Masala.
That Indian food is catching on with mainstream America is no secret for this year another finalist was the Madras Curry Cooking Spice and Rub from Dulcet Cuisine. Last year a company called Rolls Enterprise in Pittsboro, North Carolina won the Gold Award for Outstanding Codiment for its Kerala Curry Tomato Chutney.
This year’s Sofis were announced at a red carpet ceremony hosted by noted chef Ming Tsai. The people behind the gold-winning samosas are the Singh family. The matriarch, Sukhi, is a Masters in English literature from Meerut University and immigrated to America with her family. One thing led to another and the expert cook graduated to a whole new career with Sukhi’s Gourmet Indian Cuisine, which she runs with her husband Surinder, son Dalbir and daughters Bandana and Sanjog in California.
6 Comments
Thanks for the comments, Geeta – Indian food is really big now and so you’re seeing India-influenced Food pop up in all sorts of places.
What is City Shows? Are you involved with Simply Ming? As you know, Indians have a craze for Chinese food too – especially Indian-Chinese which is becoming popular in areas with a large Indian-American population.
What a fab story. Congrats to Sukhi and the Singh Family. Chef Ming Tsai hosts SIMPLY MING, a 30min cooking program on PBS. He is one of the best chefs and most DOWN-TO-EARTH and REAL ones out there. His mixing of east and west — each week he chooses two ingredients, one from the “EAST” and one from the “WEST’. He then creates several dishes using those two ingredients — he refers to them as this week’s HERO’s. He also has a restaurant in Mass called, BLUE GINGER. Thanks for sharing this story with all Lavina.
Hemant, it’s particularly the randomness of these stories and their unexpectedness which engages me. I’m still working on some other tales from the food show – the mango deluge, the Indian cashew invasion and of course the stories behind basmati rice. Met so many traders from India at this show and each of them had really offbeat stories to tell about their work.
Also, Indians have infiltrated almost every workspace so their stories are ever richer, sometimes filled with pathos, sometimes humor. Hope to document them all and would invite readers to connect me to real people that should be written about.
Wonderful website. I especially love the off-beat nature of some of the stories you cover. Who would have thought of covering this fancy food show story. beautiful.
Thanks, Shailly. I hope also to get in all the unique stories, the personal Olympics all of us seem to run and which don’t always make it into the news!
Congratulations on this fabulous website, Lavina. You really have created a very rich world here — with so much to read. Looking forward to poking around.