Zen and the art of red flame cooking

Kasi Viswanathan, Executive Chef at Hotel Atria in Bengaluru for over six years, has a glow on his face these days. It has more to do with the conditions under which he is cooking than the cooking alone.

“Now cooking is enjoyable,  no longer a chore,” he says pointing out the  contraption that sits on his worktable. Though it looks exactly like a burner in a stove,  the Agnisumukh uses infra red rays instead of the standard blue flame. The physics involved has to do with horizontal flame, instead of vertical, as in conventional stoves.

Viswanathan is speaking on behalf of millions of other chefs as well who have to endure harsh cooking conditions as they churn out dish after dish for the guests. Typically, chefs operate in kitchens where food is cooked at extremely high temperatures and since they have to babysit the food, most of them have burn marks in the midriff.

“Our device is different. It produces intense flameless radiant heat using LPG, similar to heat produced by charcoal,” says Hari Rao, the founder of Agnisumukh, the start-up that has designed this new cooking stove. Rao launched Agnisumukh with the help of TS Umesh, an industrial kitchen designer; Samson John, a green energy consultant; V B Krishnan, an award winning missile scientist; and Maheshwar Bandham, a chartered accountant.

The new stove cooks food 25 per cent faster, resulting in power savings of 50-60 per cent every month, in addition to 30 per cent saving in LPG. “Most importantly,  it does not produce carbon soot,” says Viswanathan. Interestingly, Rao who is in his late 40s, holds a day time job as a Joint Commissioner of Income Tax, dispelling the belief that start-ups are the preserve of  20-somethings. The stove is manufactured in Bengaluru, comes in different sizes, and can even be used to barbecue or as a flat pan to make dosas. When it was sent to the LPG Equipment Research Centre for testing,  its efficiency rate  clocked  65 per cent, almost twice that of a traditional stove.

And what about its price? Though on the higher side at  ₹1,50,000, the company strongly believes that lower emission and LPG consumption will be its  USP. Rao's back of the envelope calculation reveals that the machine pays itself out in the first year itself. “On an average, companies spend ₹11 lakh every year on gas,” he says. 

And proof of the pudding can be seen from the fact that companies with large kitchens have already deployed Agnisumukh. Atria, for example, is using two stoves and is planning to install 20 more. Corporates like Infosys, ITC and Apollo Hospitals have started installing it and the company is talking to Akshaya Patra, the mid day meal experts for deploying the technology. Just to put it in perspective, Infosys has around eight kitchens, serving in excess of 20,000 employees in its Bengaluru campus and Agnisumukh is currently used there and in Thiruvananthapuram.

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