Why I Started PIKL — The Recipe That Refused to Die
Every jar of PIKL carries sixty years of memory. The green chilli pickle I make today is the same one that filled the canteens and kitchens of Bengaluru in the 1960s — and almost disappeared with time.
My uncle, late D R Mallapur, ran a small food company called AFCON — Annapurna Food Products & Condiments — started in the 1960s by a brilliant food technologist, late Bellari Bhavani Shankar Rao, a gold medalist in food science. What AFCON made, above everything else, was a green chilli pickle that people still talk about in hushed, reverent tones.
"I still remember the smell of those green chillies. There was nothing else like it in Bengaluru."
I joined AFCON in 1979, and for years I worked alongside my uncle learning every detail of that recipe. The exact ratio of mustard seeds to fenugreek. The precise amount of groundnut oil. The technique of sun-drying. These things cannot be written down — they live in your hands and your nose.
The jars that started everything — PIKL in Yeshwantpur, 2024
When AFCON eventually wound down, that recipe could have been lost forever. It nearly was. For years I thought about it — how something so beloved could simply vanish. And then, one quiet afternoon, I decided it wouldn't. PIKL was born not as a business, but as an act of preservation.
What makes the recipe different
Most commercial pickles use red chilli powder for heat and colour. We use 72% fresh green chillies — hand-selected, cut fresh, never dried into powder. The heat is real but gentle. The colour is honest. Nothing is faked.
The mustard seeds, the fenugreek, the turmeric, the asafoetida — each one has a role that was worked out over decades of trial and adjustment. When you open a jar of PIKL, what you smell is sixty years of memory.