Around 500 cooks and 300 helping hands prepare 100 different offerings known as Mahaprasad or Abhada for Lord Jagannath, which are served to the Deity six times a day.
The kitchen complex has 32 rooms, 752 stoves and nine earthen pots. The complex is located several feet above and to the left of the temple's main gate, called the Simhadwara, or the Lion gate, and covers roughly one acre. The cooking pots are unique. Made of unfired clay, they resemble the French sauté pans. As the food cooks in the pots, their walls become very hot. The pots provide amazing heat retention - food stored in them stays piping hot for up to four or five hours - it tastes exceptionally delicious.
One thousand men are employed in the kitchen every day. Executive chefs, called swaras, are the only ones allowed to cook. Then there are kitchen assistants, called jogunias, who wash the vegetables, cut them and stonegrind the spices for the executive chefs.
All members of the kitchen staff begin their training at the age of twelve. They serve for life, or until they become too old to perform their duties.
The one hundred different dishes prepared daily by the temple chefs fall into two categories - pakka and sukka.
Pakka foods are those that are boiled, such as dals, soups, stews, rice, kiccharis, and all vegetable dishes. Sukka, or dry foods, include cookies, biscuits, sweetmeats and pastries.
As with the fruits and vegetables selected for use in the Jagannatha kitchens, the standard for spices has also remained constant for two thousand years.
Only locally grown spices are used, and these include mace, cumin, fennel, nutmeg, cardamom, cinnamon, coriander, mustard seed, and black cumin etc.
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