While I was shopping one day in Delhi, I came across an outdoor “food fest” right off Connaught Place. This is something I’ve never before seen in India, and the offerings were delectable. Unfortunately, I had a big lunch on tap that afternoon, so I forced myself to simply photograph and not eat what you’re about to see. (It was hard!) But here are some of the streeet foods of India—a country that, along with China and France, has one of the world’s three great cuisines.
Identification of the comestibles was done with the help of Indian friends.
First, a very common street food: roasted sweet potatoes, here served with starfruit. A savory form of chaat (cereal-like snack, see below) is also for sale:
Channa, or chickpeas, is one of the favorite snacks in India. They can be served curried and whole or, as in these three versions on offer, mashed with spices. Two of these have paneer (Indian cheese):
Aalo tikka (spicy potatoes):
On the left, dokla, a savory rice-and-chickpea dish often eaten for breakfast. Chaat, spicy crunchy snacks, on the right:
Dessert: ghavar, a sweet made with flour, ghee (clarified butter), milk, and sweet spices. I’m not quite sure about this one, though; it may be rice pudding.
Kheer (rice pudding with saffron):
The multifarious forms of chaat, or savory snack, are favorites of mine. (The Wikipedia article lists the many varieties.) They can be dry, and in that form make a great accompaniment to beer (you can often find them in Indian food stores or even gourmet groceries in the US). Or they can be mixed with onion, tamarind sauce, yogurt, lime juice, and various other spices and condiments, like the famous bhelpuri of Mumbai. Here are some of the dry chaats on offer at the food fair. You can often get custom chaats simply by specifying which of the ingredients below should be mixed. (I can’t identify them all).
A chaat stall, from which you can order mixed snacks garnished with the wet ingredients on the left:
Finally, after a big meal there’s no better digestif then paan, a betel leaf wrapped around various ingredients. The sweet paans (meetha paan) offered at this fancy stall are good at refreshing the mouth after some spicy Indian food:
You pop the whole thing into your mouth and chew, getting a fantastic explosion of flavors. If you get a chance to have a sweet paan in the US (it’s possible now that betel leaves can be imported), don’t pass it up. Ingredients include jaggery (palm sugar), date paste, fennel seed, cloves, cardamom, saffron, and a lot of other stuff that I can’t identify in the premade paans below.
Now THAT was a awesome set of photos of food. Spectacular and oh-so-tempting!
These are a feast for the eyes as well as the stomach!
Just what I was thinking!
Those large chickpea dishes remind me of the way the Spanish cook paella. Convergent cuisinelution? 🙂
We Brits love our curry (even if most our Indian restaurants are actually Bangladeshi,
so this looks like heaven on earth (ahem).
If only someone had invented smellovision.
I love curries. All kinds of curries.
me too!
I wonder about that – smellovision could be neat, but imagine getting smellovision spam! (The email abuse, not the meat-in-a-can.)
I’m so hungry now & all I have is oatmeal!
Same here. I love bhel(puri). Gotta make some soon.
Beautiful photos!!
Do you have a good recipe for it?
We go to 2 restaurants that serve the dish.
Would love to make it. Thanks for the inspiration.
Lovely. I’ve always photographed food and markets everywhere around the world.
I have only once been reprimanded for it. Once, in Egypt, a local guy starting giving me crap about photographing the local street market (very informal and small), saying I should be photo photographing the fancy hotels in another part of the city instead. I just walked away from him as quickly as I could (he was in a car, so I was much more maneuverable).
Oh, man, that looks good.
Yum! To hell or Connaught (Place)!
You have managed to make me very curious about the meetha paan. I will definitely be trying it as soon as I can find it.
Me too!
I want to dive into that vat-like pan of Kheer. 🙂
Such glorious colours! I’m trying to imagine what it smelled like and no doubt failing miserably, but it’s fun to try.
NO question about it! One of the many wonderful things about travel throughout India was the food! SUBLIME!
I forgot to ask…did you go to Crawford market in Mumbai? AMAZING!
Yes I did, but on an earlier trip. This time I stayed in Northern India.
These are gorgeous photos, Dr. C. The food looks mouth-wateringly, finger-lickin’ good.
It all looks delicious. I heard that the government was banning street food a couple years or so ago. Have they gone back on that?
No government in India which tried banning “street food” would dream of being re-elected.
Quite possibly, what you heard about was banning street food hawkers from running their business in certain places. But that’s a very different proposition.
No government in India which tried banning “street food” would dream of being re-elected.
Quite possibly, what you heard about was banning street food hawkers from running their business in certain places. But that’s a very different proposition.
Love the pics.
Being a bit nit-picky here.
“Dhokla” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dhokla) origniates from the state of Gujarat, and is eaten as a snack, or in meal (lunch/dinner) normally during feast. “Dhokla” is categorised as “farsan” (savouries made out of “besan” (chickpea flour)).
The Gujarati meal does not have courses (except rice and buttermilk at the end of meal). Sweets are consumed along with the main dishes.
The other sweet mentioned in the post is “Ghevar”, I presume. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghevar
Talking of Gujarati food…. the 2015 Leicester Beer Festival will be held again in the Charotar Patidar Samaj. As a consequence there will be a couple of hundred beers to sample plus curry, rice, nan, samosas and bhajis cooked in the venue kitchen.
Noms and quaff.
Is there such a thing as food porn? 😄 Those photos are so full of color, aroma, flavor, texture, etc. Need to find a good Indian restaurant, asap.
Wow, I could eat Indian food every day and never get tired of it. Well, I don’t know about for breakfast but certainly for the rest of the day!
Thank you for these postings, very enjoyable.
I found that the folks at nuts.com have a couple of chaat things. type in chickpea in the search and you can find squashed chick peas with spices (which I very much like though they look kinda awful), something called Punjabi mix, etc. no relation to the company, just like what they have.