Cooke Town · Bakes at 04:00

Flour, water, salt, time

Four ingredients, thirty-six hours, and a deck oven we light with casuarina wood at four in the morning.

See this week’s bake

Stone mill grinding khapli wheat — 04:10 — khapli wheat from Belgaum, milled here that hour.

Hands shaping a boule on a wooden bench — 05:30 — shaping. Everything is folded by hand, nothing is machine-mixed.

Loaves being loaded into a wood-fired deck oven — 06:45 — loading the deck. It holds forty loaves at a time.

Racks of cooling sourdough loaves — 08:00 — cooling racks. Doors open at nine and Fridays go fast.

Since 2019

A bakery built around Indian grain

Rasa started as a Sunday bread stall on Wheeler Road, run by Aparna and Zubin, who were both tired of loaves made from imported white flour. Everything we bake now uses grain grown within Karnataka and Maharashtra — khapli emmer, ponni rice flour, little millet — milled on a stone mill in the back room. It behaves nothing like European flour and it took us two years to stop fighting it. Now the sourness is gentler, the crumb is custardy, and a loaf keeps four days in a Bengaluru monsoon without going to rubber.