A long drive home brought a lightbulb moment for husband-and-wife JD Walsh and Shireen Qadri.
Traveling back from a visit to Qadri’s family in Maryland with a package of her mom’s spice blend for rogan josh, the couple had been discussing the difficulties of cooking Indian food from scratch and the convenience of pre-prepared spice mixes when “it just sort of all clicked,” Qadri told Billy Penn. “Like, why not do this with more dishes?”
The result is Moji Masala, a line of organic, freshly-ground spice blends, designed to help home cooks conveniently create a range of Indian meat- or vegetable-based dishes in the comfort of their own kitchens (moji is Kashmiri for ‘mother’; masala means ‘spice blend’).
The aim is to “entice people who really care about what they’re putting into their bodies, and who love Indian food, to cook it at home,” Walsh explained. “That’s why we made it so simple.”
Except for two products — garam and sweet masala — each blend contains the spices needed for a single dish that feeds 3 to 5 people. The tandoori-style masala, for example, gets added to a quarter cup olive oil and two tablespoons of tomato paste for a marinade that’ll coat eight chicken breasts, to be baked for 45 minutes. A vegan option, the aloo rasedar masala only requires a teaspoon of salt, three tablespoons of vegetable oil, a pound-and-a-half of potatoes, and a prep and cooking total of 30 minutes.
Packaging for each blend lists all additional ingredients needed for the dish, with a QR code linking to a video demonstration on Moji Masala’s website — there’s even a Spotify playlist to help set a masala-mixing mood. Blends are priced between $5 and $10, with bundled sets running between $16 and $90.
Perfecting the blends was a three-year process, Qadri working to scale down her mother’s recipes for smaller families — “turns out my mom doesn’t measure things,” she realized early on. A full year was spent on tastings the couple hosted for friends and neighbors, as well as communal cooking classes to determine how to best streamline the process for home chefs.
“We wanted that consistency of experience and taste,” Qadri said, “so, that took a lot longer than we’d thought.”
Crucially, she explained, the spices are all organic, with no preservatives or additives, and are largely sourced from India. “Most of what we buy are seeds,” Qadri said, in an effort to avoid the metals sometimes added to spices for coloring or to increase weight, “and we grind them ourselves into the blends.”
Qadri and Walsh, both 51, launched the business after stepping away from their respective careers, hers in finance, his as founder of a basketball school with camps set up throughout Asia. The couple share commonalities in their backgrounds: born in Ireland to a Kashmiri family that emigrated to Maryland when she was five, Qadri grew up on the meals that inspired Moji Masala. New York-born Irish American Walsh, on the other hand, developed his familiarity with Indian cuisine over a half-decade of trips throughout the country, working with its various basketball federations.
“We really wanted a family business that would be meaningful to us,” Qadri said. “And one of the things we were both passionate about was Indian food.”
While Moji Masala was launched with a focus on Kashmiri recipes, the goal is to eventually represent all pockets of Indian cuisine. “Many people only know [the differences between] north and south,” Qadri explained. “But there’s Kashmiri, Gujarati, Punjabi, Bengali, and as you move further south you get into Kerala and Chennai, which are totally different spices.”
After launching their business while living in Manhattan, Qadri and Walsh relocated to Chestnut Hill during the pandemic, partly to provide an increased proximity to nature for their young daughter. They’ve since set up Moji Masala at commercial kitchen workspace Culinary Collective in Frankford.
“It’s been a fantastic experience,” said Walsh of the exchange of ideas and best business practices among chefs sharing the space. “It’s such a supportive environment for all the makers that are in there, and everyone helps each other out.”
There are plans for a tasting room, and further all-age cooking classes along the lines of the ones the couple have already held at the Morris Arboretum and the Please Touch Museum. For now, their efforts remain focused on getting Moji Masala products on as many shelves as possible, with a growing emphasis on smaller, health-oriented markets like Riverwards Produce, Weavers Way Co-Op, and Salt and Vinegar.
“These are places where people really care about what kinds of food people are [consuming,]” Walsh said, “and that just fits right in with what we’re doing.”
For more information and online orders, visit mojimasala.com.
