Experience the Best of Indian Cuisine with Saakshi's Tiffin Service

A tiffin service delivers home-cooked meals to your door on a repeating schedule. Not a takeaway, not a recipe box with a bag of raw ingredients in it — cooked food, portioned as meals, arriving on a rhythm you set. Saakshi's Kitchen cooks the everyday Punjabi repertoire in Brighton and delivers it to households across UK mainland. This is what is actually in it, and how it works.

What is a tiffin service?

The word "tiffin" comes from the dabba system of Indian cities, where a lunch cooked at home is carried in a stacked steel tin to whoever is at work. The idea it carries is home food, portioned as one person's meal, delivered on a schedule. What has changed is the distance: instead of crossing Mumbai in two hours, meals travel across the country frozen and wait in your freezer until you want them.

What has not changed is the point of it. A tiffin is not a special meal. It is the meal you eat on an ordinary evening because somebody cooked it for you.

What is in a Saakshi's tiffin?

The everyday Indian repertoire, not a restaurant menu:

• Dal tadka — the dish that tells you everything about a kitchen.
• Rajma chawal — kidney beans and rice, Sunday lunch across most of Punjab.
• Chole — chickpeas cooked dark and tangy with amchur.
• Kadhi — yoghurt and gram flour, gently sour, and nothing like anything on a takeaway menu.
• Seasonal sabzi — aloo gobi, bhindi, baingan bharta, whatever is worth cooking that week.
• Paneer and meat dishes, alongside rice and roti.

Most of the menu is vegetarian, which is the honest description rather than a positioning exercise: everyday Punjabi home cooking simply is vegetarian most nights of the week. Where we cook meat, the meats cooked in our kitchen are halal. Every dish carries its full ingredient list and allergen information on its product page, and because we cook in one kitchen where wheat, dairy, mustard and sesame are all in use, we cannot guarantee any dish is completely free from a given allergen.

How is it cooked?

In small batches, in our FSA 5-star kitchen, from family recipes cooked the way our family cooks them. In practice that means four specific things:

• The masala is built from scratch every batch — onion, tomato, ginger and garlic, bhuno'd until the oil separates — rather than ladled from a standing base gravy.
• Dal gets a real tadka, poured over at the end: hot ghee, jeera, sometimes hing and a dried red chilli.
• Spices are ground and blended in our own kitchen, instead of one generic curry powder doing all the work.
• No cream-and-butter finish. We do not float ghee on the top for the photograph.

Our kitchen holds a 5-star rating on the FSA food hygiene register, which you can look up yourself.

How spicy is it?

Milder than a restaurant curry — spiced, not hot. The flavour sits in the masala and in the pantry spices: haldi, jeera, dhania, ginger, garlic. Chilli is a choice rather than the headline. It is the level a family actually cooks at, because the same pot has to feed a nine-year-old and a grandparent.

How does it arrive, and how do you heat it?

Meals arrive frozen, portioned individually, in an insulated box.

1. Put them straight in the freezer and leave them there until you want them.
2. Cook or reheat straight from frozen, following the instructions on the pack, until piping hot all the way through.
3. Don't refreeze once defrosted. If something has defrosted, eat it within 24 hours and reheat it once only.

There is no defrost-it-this-morning step to remember, which is most of the appeal on a weeknight.

How is it different from a takeaway?

Different cuisine, different occasion. Almost every curry house in Britain builds from one standing base gravy, split at the pass with chilli, tomato, cream and sugar — a genuinely clever system for getting forty covers out in an hour. A home kitchen has no pass, so it starts each dish from scratch. Restaurant Indian is celebration food; ghar ka khana is Tuesday night, and Tuesday keeps coming round.

Who orders it?

People who can cook and have no evenings to do it in; students a long way from a kitchen that makes food they recognise; parents ordering for a son or daughter in another city; adult children ordering for an elderly parent who has stopped cooking for one. A good share of our boxes are bought by one person and eaten by another — "khaana khaya?" is a question, but sending food is the answer.

79% of our orders come from families who order again, which is the only test of a tiffin service that means anything.

Where do you deliver?

Across UK mainland. Some areas we can't reach, so check your postcode before you plan a week of dinners around it.

New to tiffin? Read the full guide →
See this week's menu and build a box →
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