Indian Street Food Part II

Now on to the other two chaat dishes of the sampler from The Curry Hut which I featured in the last post - papdi chaat and mixed vegetable pakora. Weelll, I guess it's mostly the former, since I didn't find the pakora anything too unusual, at least in my experience.

Papdi Chaat

This was actually my favourite, and also the spiciest, of the three chaat served in the sampler... so you can imagine my shock when I read on wiki that it's considered an Indian fast food!! O_o If this is their fast food, then wow, I think I really don't mind having it everyday. It doesn't seem unhealthy either.

It was crispy fried dough wafer with a layer of some kind of chutney, topped with a mound of chickpea mix, then further topped with mint sauce, yoghurt and finally murukku. Yes, a heck of a lot of layers and ingredients - that's Indian fast food for you.

Here's a close up of the crispy dough base, also known as "papdi", as in the name.

It reminded me very much of Mexican food, like a deep friend tortilla spread with a fruity and spicy salsa, then topped with beans and sour cream. Except for the mint sauce and murukku I guess. Or, well, the murukku would be like nacho crumbles maybe. (I'm not aware of anything minty in Mexican food, although I wouldn't be surprised to find out that there was a parallel.) That's the best way I can describe the experience. And since I like Mexican food, it makes sense that this was my favourite chaat - messy, spicy, savoury and fruity with a dollop of cream.

Mixed Vegetable Pakora

Pakoras are deep fried fritters. In this case, the paste that was deep fried was made of Indian legumes. I think lentils and chickpeas formed the main body of the paste, with larger chunks of green peas, corn and carrots which you can see protruding out in the picture. In Singapore, the green pea-carrot-corn combination that you commonly find in the frozen vegetable section is known as "mixed vegetables", so I guess that's what the name was referring to. Overall, it tasted like a chickpea humus with some spice - I believe it was fenugreek.

This was the least spicy in my opinion, and not too salty, which was good.

The batter was deep fried until it was quite hard and crispy. I felt that it was a bit dry, especially since the chickpea and (lentil?) paste was already the dry powdery type. It would have been better served with some gravy-like dip.

Overall, this one wasn't very impressive.

The third and final post will be about the Indian dessert I ordered, so stay tuned!

~~~

The potpourri of ingredients reminded me of the scene in Slumdog Millionaire where the kids were running through the colourful slums. Not sure if this was the soundtrack that was playing, but it's the closest that I could find.

Mausam & Escape

Slumdog Millionaire Soundtrack