Foodbuzz 24, 24, 24: STREET WOK IN INDIA

“When people wore hats and gloves, nobody would dream of eating on the street. Then white gloves went out of style and, suddenly, eating just about anything in the street became OK.”
Jane Addison

Street food is synonymous with ‘food available on the street’. It is a quintessential part of the Indian culture & cuisine, & its popularity now ensures that you can find clean, amazing taste on the street. An explosion of flavours & textures, that entice your taste-buds, leaving you begging for more. Street food has always been one of the cornerstones of Asian life. Street food and drink can often bring an insight into the history of the city’s people, the geography of the land and is one of the best ways to taste authentic local culture, believes Discovery Travel and Living. It’s an intrinsic part of India cuisine, delicious & mouthwatering, & no visit to India is quite complete unless you gather the courage to try some. Just make sure you choose the right place! The delhi-belly didn’t gain its colloquial notoriety for nothing, but the right choice will transport you back to gastronomical nirvana. Join the hub & me as we roam the street & PEEP INTO THE WOK! Vegetarian options are generally based on fried food, which appear to blur boundaries of main meal, snack, appetizer etc. A kaleidoscope of flavours exist all in the same dish…sweet, sour, crisp, soft… & always the option of an extra spicy kick. The good thing is that with most non-marinated food on the street, you can customize the chili factor. Eat as you like. Treat it as a main meal or snack. To cover as much variety of street food we hit the street early. What do we find here…?We come face to face with HOT SAMS, or samosas as the world knows them!! Samosas are typically Indian street food, & you will find fresh samosas being fried at every corner you go around, or at a ‘Halwai’ – an Indian sweet-maker, baker & deep-fryer! Usually stuffed with a mixture of boiled potatoes, peas, raisins, cashew nuts & cottage-cheese, given a mighty kick with Indian masalas/spices & some green chilies thrown in, samosas are deep-fried Indian pastry. They are very enjoyable indeed on a cold winter day, even better on a rainy day. This triangular pastry (a small turnover deep-fried pastry) is quite popular, & jostles for space in a line of long & illustrious street food called CHAAT. Chaat is plate of savoury snacks, typically served at road-side tracks from stalls or carts in Pakistan, India and the rest of South Asia. The word derives from Hindi चाट (tasting, a delicacy), from चाटना (to taste), from Prakrit चट्टेइ (to devour with relish, eat noisily).The chaat variants are all based on fried dough, with various other ingredients. The original chaat is a mixture of potato pieces, crispy fried bread, gram bean and spices, but other popular variants included Aloo Tikkis (garnished with onion, coriander, hot spices and a dash of curd), bhel puri, dahi puri, panipuri, dahi vada, papdi chaat, and sev puri. There are common elements among these variants including dahi, or yogurt; chopped onions and coriander; sev (small dried yellow noodles); and chaat masala. Our second wok stop is at a Chaat Wala, to eat Aloo Tikkis, traditional crisp fried potato patties, somewhat like rosti, but with a mildly spiced lentil filling! The chef is obliging & his name is Suresh. He swears by ooodles of clarified butter / ghee, & proclaims that that’s where the real taste lies! He’s been doing this since he was 12, for the past 22 years. Oh boy! All that fat in the pan scares me, but he says he’s been eating & making this stuff forever & hasn’t put on or lost weight. New diet anyone? The Indian Chaatwalas Diet!!! YUM! He expertly makes the patties like a machine, & gets on with his job. He has an infectious level of enthusiasm & is out to please. Walks us through the by lanes of Chandni Chowk as he lovingly fries the croquettes, presenting to us the most delicious ‘tikkis’ ever! Each tikki is given TLC; there is uniformity in each piece! We choose our toppings, light & non-fussy, though you can go in for the works if you like! Street food meals have no norms, so breaking away from the ‘end of the meal dessert’ tradition, we get irresistibly tempted to come to a grinding halt at the sweet shop. There are gulab jamuns, jalebis & gajar-ka-halwa up for grabs. Gulab jamun is a sweet dish made of a dough consisting mainly of milk solids (often including double cream and flour), in a sugar syrup flavored with cardamom seeds and rosewater or saffron. Gajar-ka-halwa is a halwa/pudding where grated carrots are cooked in milk, with a generous sprinkling of dry fruits added to it. We get hopelessly distracted by fresh hot jalebis which are just being fried. One bite & you are hooked. Jalebis are crisp swirls of batter, piped into hot oil, fried to golden brown perfection, & then immediately dunked into sugar syrup. The man literally doodles them onto hot oil, somewhat like Spanish Churros. But here, the batter is much thinner, & it is piped out of cheesecloth, under pressure, in a thin stream. The result is sweet heaven … bite into a crisp exterior, & then the sweetness of the syrup within floods your mouth. It’s addictive to say the least, but we nibble on quite a few crispy bites, save some for after dinner & carry on. We have a trail to blaze & it leads us to the tandoor. HOT! HOT! HOT! One peep within & I’m almost transported to Hansel & Gretel & the witches’ hot oven! Wokking into non-vegetarian street, it’s a happening place here. The tandoor has been fired up, & you can see rows upon rows of skewered delicacies. Here you have to no choice on the level of spices; they’ve been included in the marination, & some can be quite SPICY!! We find a dazzling array of skewered meats & chunks of cottage cheese. There’s something for everyone – chicken tikka, reshmi kebabs, tandoori chicken, seekh kebab, burra kebab, paneer tikka…all waiting to be popped into a burning hot tandoor. If you want to move from snack to meal, then bread cannot be far behind. Expert hands fling thin roomali rotis in the air like handkerchiefs. They break off pieces of dough, roll out circles or triangles, & slap naans or tandoori rotis into searing hot ovens. The naans are liberally sprinkled with kalonji or onion seeds.Give the sober naan a slathering of butter, & reach butter naan nirvana! How good can it get! If that’s not quite your calorie ridden scene, then try a lachcha paratha…layers & layers of thin pastry dough which are cooked to perfection in the hot tandoor, to reveal layers of paper thin flatbread. We wind up our meal with a nibble at the jalebis, which are still quite warm &, surprisngly, still crisp. It’s been a wonderful experience, one that we are tempted to enjoy over & over again. So when you wok the street in gay abandon, leave the frills & fancies behind. No fancy china plates, no polished cutlery. Street food is often served on steel plates (reusable, unbreakable & can live a zillion years), on plastic ware, in paper bags, & sometimes in disposable & environment friendly plates & bowls made out of leaves. Anything goes!