Dishes by Indian vendors are long on exotic spices and savory ingredients, but easy to assemble and exciting to eat.
By JANET K. KEELER
Published October 1, 2003
[Times photos: Janet K. Keeler]
Cookbook author Raghavan Iyer shares his experiences of eating street food in his native Bombay with students at Apron’s Cooking School at the Publix supermarket in Citrus Park.
Vada paav, a typical Bombay street food, begins with potato cakes spiced with cilantro, fresh ginger, garlic and hot chilies. The potato cakes are battered and deep-fried, then served with a roasted peanut and chili chutney on hamburger rolls.
TAMPA - To get the true flavor of a country, you must sample the food sold by street vendors pushing carts or cooking in stalls barely wide enough to hold them and their equipment.
From those makeshift kitchens, visitors find authenticity in both taste and experience. There are no fancy menus, just prices scrawled on cardboard, if at all. Most times, customers don't get utensils and are lucky if there are napkins. This is how the locals eat.
In England, street food might be fish and chips wrapped in butcher paper and seeping grease. Empanadas, the spicy meat turnovers of Argentina, are nibbled on the streets there, and in China, steamed dumplings warm souls on bitter days.
In the Tampa Bay area, street food is limited to hot dogs sold on corners, or maybe boiled peanuts found by drivers who slip the congestion of city roads. The closest our car culture comes to walking-around food is funnel cakes and elephant ears when the state fair comes to town.
One of the most impressive arrays of street food is found in India, where even residents of the smallest villages are sustained between meals by fried samosas, or other delicacies, cooked in ancient, or at least very used, woklike fryers. Samosas, spicy, vegetable-filled dumplings, are found all over India, while other foods are regional specialties, such as the crispy dosas of southern India or the yogurt-marinated kebabs of the north.
And in Bombay, a city of 12-million people known for its movie industry and diverse population, street food is another thing altogether. Because so much of the city's population lives on the streets, the sidewalks in more congested areas resemble bedrooms and kitchens more than passageways.
"The street food of Bombay is close to my heart," says cookbook author Raghavan Iyer, just before beginning a recent class on the subject at Apron's Cooking School at the Publix in Citrus Park. A handful of students gathered to learn to make vada paav (VAH-dah pahv), garlic potato finger sandwiches, and sev batata poori (sehv bah-TAH-TAH POUR-ee), crispy bread with potato, mango and noodles.
Iyer has a fond spot for Bombay street cuisine because for the first 21 years of his life he lived in the teeming metropolis, eating finger foods whenever he could, despite warnings from his oldest sister - she was the doctor who delivered him - that bacteria might lurk in those tempting treats.
(Indeed, travelers to India are warned to be careful about eating street food, especially uncooked items like smoothies and sugarcane juice. Many take their chances, though, on fried foods because they believe the high heat kills bacteria. Bottled water is also recommended.)
Now 42, Iyer has lived in the Midwest for half his life, currently in Minneapolis. He has a bachelor's degree in chemistry from an Indian university and he earned another in hotel and restaurant management from Michigan State University.
Since coming to the states, he has worked as a chef, caterer and cooking teacher. His recent successes include two well-recived cookbooks, Betty Crocker's Indian Home Cuisine (Hungry Minds Inc., 2001, $23.95) and The Turmeric Trail (St. Martin's Press, 2002, $32.50). The Turmeric Trail was a finalist in the international cookbook category of this year's James Beard Awards.
He is working on his third cookbook, The Enlightened Indian, which focuses on incorporating Indian spices and techniques into other cuisines. For instance, one of the recipes will be a mango and cardamom cheesecake, a classic dessert crossed with two indigenous Indian flavors.
Try these dishes made in the Apron's class, keeping in mind that Indian cooking is not difficult in technique but long on ingredients. A trip to an Indian specialty market, such as N.S. Food and Gifts (5522 Hanley Road, Tampa; 813-243-1522) or Kohinoor (2440 State Road 580, Clearwater; 727-799-9542) and Mahal Bazaar, 2480 E Bay Drive, Largo, 727-536-2178), will be necessary.
Here are some tips for three popular Bombay snacks (more instructions are included in accompanying recipes):
Sev Batata Poori. "Food should sing in your mouth; this one actually dances," Iyer says. These 2-inch crispy puffs stuffed with a savory potato-onion-mango mixture and two chutneys are to be popped in the mouth all at once. The layers of flavors hit one after the other: mild, hot, sweet then savory. A definite tango of taste.
Small pooris can be bought by the bag at Indian markets. To stuff them, tap a hole in the top and then spoon in a bit of filling. Next comes a chutney of cilantro, fresh ginger and lots of hot chilies. How much depends on how much you can handle. When you order one from a Bombay street vendor, you can specify.
The hot chutney is followed by a dollop of sweet tamarind and date chutney. This is quite sweet and provides a pleasant counterpoint to the heat.
Assemble these bite-size treats just before serving or the crisp puffs will become soggy. The fillings can all be made ahead, which makes them an attractive idea for a cocktail party.
Chana Bhatura. The ingredient list is long for this garbanzo bean stew (pronounced CHA-nah bah-TWO-rah) but the technique is simple and the results delicious. The stew can be made up to a day ahead but the bhaturas, a soft, puffy bread, must be fried right before serving; the dough, however, can be made up to 24 hours in advance.
If you don't want to make the bread, you can use flour tortillas, which puff as they deep-fry. However, tortillas are more delicate than bhaturas and won't hold the stew. Not a problem if you plan to serve this dish in bowls as a main course.
Vada Paav. These garlic potato finger sandwiches sound strange at first because of the hamburger rolls used to cradle the spicy potato fritters. But the soft, bland bread is the most unobtrusive way to carry the fritters when walking down a crowded street.
This is a recipe that could easily become something else. The fritter mixture, mashed potatoes spiked with cilantro, fresh ginger, garlic and hot chilies, could replace the ubiquitous wasabi offering at many restaurants, with the addition of a little cream.
The potato fritters are dressed with a chutney of roasted Spanish peanuts, coriander, cumin, chilies, sesame seed and garlic. Make sure to roast the peanuts first because the following steps need the residual oil left in the pan.
Though we often think of chutney as a moist, fruit relish, it can also be dry like this peanut variety or soupy like the hot chutney that accompanies the batata pooris.
The mixture of these eye-popping flavors will make you say vada POW!, a nickname for this street food adopted by many Western visitors to India.
