Indian street food with a twist

Two sisters work together to create comfort food.

Tanvi Swar says the best thing about being in business with your sister is you can be completely honest with feedback. “If I come up with an idea, Akash can tell me outright if it won’t work, and when she makes food, if something isn’t right or we need to make it look or taste different, I can say it openly.”

An advertising professional by day, Tanvi and her younger sibling, Akash Swar, are the brains behind Toronto’s Little Sister Baking. Their new venture rei- magines traditional Indian street food and flavours with global baking techniques not typically seen in such dishes.

Akash, who previously worked at Toronto restaurants like Buca and Auberge du Pommier, brings her skills as a Cordon Bleu-trained pastry chef.

But the story behind Little Sister Baking is one that rings true for many immigrants: Food is one of the most important and accessible ways to connect to their culture.

After graduating from culinary school in 2019, Akash intended to travel Europe to hone her pastry skills, but the pandemic put a halt to those plans. “During that time, we often found ourselves wanting Indian comfort foods from home and making them,” says Akash, explaining that they began experimenting with things they’d never cooked up before and posting those creations on Instagram. It wasn’t long before people started asking if they could buy the treats.

Little Sister Baking was officially born last summer, and after the success of their holiday desserts, they expanded operations at the start of this year and found a commercial kitchen. Tanvi handles the marketing, while Akash focuses on whipping up orders for a menu that sells out every week on Tock within a couple of hours.

Toronto is blowing up with pandemic pivots and food popups, but Little Sister Baking is exploring new ground: You won’t find anyone else in Toronto stuffing pillowy buns with labneh and topping them with za’atar from Soufi’s, or filling Paris-Brests with Alphonso mangoes sourced from India. The two sisters grew up in Dubai and India, and Akash has formal training in making French desserts, so you’ll find lots of cross-cultural influences in their baked goods.

The sisters feel the full array of Indian pastry is hard to get in Toronto. Given that samosa puffs are among their top-sellers — imagine something like a flaky croissant with the bite of a British pasty, loaded with a pea and potato filling — they seem to be on to something.

“The baking scene is very much rooted in French and Italian cultures, and while we love devouring those items by the handful, we still miss the spicy, savoury baked goods of home,” says Tanvi.

“As a colonized country, India was left with many baking techniques from the British, French, Dutch and Portuguese, which we adjusted to our tastes.”

The sisters hope to have a storefront for their bakery in the future. “We imagine it as a place to showcase our food and other vendors from the South Asian diaspora,” says Tanvi, “a space that feels like home, where we can connect with the community, and isn’t the best way to do that through food?”