Bhavna
Who can resist street food? At least, I can’t! In this article, I am going to share How to safely enjoy India’s incredible street food at home. If you are looking into keeping your family tummies happier & healthier, follow these yummy tips/tricks in the kitchen. Indian street foods are known worldwide for their taste, diversity and easy accessibility in various cities like Mumbai, Delhi, Kolkata and in many more regions. In fact, Indian street food has gone worldwide now…
India is a country that loves its food — and street food is no exception. Tucking into street food is one of the joys of traveling in India. I look forward to my trip to India almost every other year. The main reason is to visit my parents and the second reason is to eat street food!
So is there really a secret to making street food? Absolutely, YES!
Whenever I eat any food out of my home kitchen, I always try my best to derive the taste elements within the food I eat to figure out what is something different used in the recipe that I normally miss in my homemade recipes. And a lot of time I have successfully created that restaurant or street taste in my home kitchen lab, at least closer to that…
The first thing is to learn all the sauce, chutney or the condiments used in street food. For example, chili garlic sauce, chutneys like mint, coriander, date-jaggery-tamarin, peanut (Mumphali), etc. I prepare chutneys and sauce in big batches and then keep small portion in my refrigerator for weekly use and the rest I pop in the freezer. My weekly ingredients list contains making yogurt, paneer, Dosa idli batter, khaman batter (Fermented batter can be refrigerated up to a week or freeze for up to 3 months) at home. Cook proper rice once and refrigerate to prepare recipes later like biryani, pulao, yellow lime or yogurt rice, vegetable fried rice and so on.
Secondly, Indian cuisine uses lot of ginger, garlic, green chili, coriander leaves, lime, and more. so I always have big stock on all these ingredients.
Next, I prepare few recipes and keep them handy to use in recipes. Indian cuisine can get elaborate if few recipes are not prepared ahead of time. For example, I keep spiced rice puffs ready for Indian street food Bhel chaat. One can always find Besan sev in my kitchen to jazz up many recipes like Khaman, all kinds of chaat and so on. I soak, boil and freeze some of the legumes, like dry yellow peas for ragda chaat, sev usal, misal pav, rajma for curry, chickpeas for Chole and so on.
There are few things I buy ready from the grocery as those ingredients may take lot of time to prepare while cheaper to buy from the store. For example, I buy stone bakes naan and reheat at home, apply butter on it and voila, restaurant naan at home…Make paneer or buy big cube from the store. I buy variety of spices to add flavors in my recipes.
Another thing to keep in mind is that one has to have good utensils to prepare food efficiently in the kitchen. For example, I can’t imagine myself cooking without pressure cooker. I have invested in stove top and electric pressure cooker to make my life easier.
Below I am going to share some of my videos to give you plenty of ideas on how to bring that restaurant or street food taste in homemade food.
Dosa menu is served often in my family so I prepare concentrated sambhar in big batch to freeze and use later during busy weeknights. As I mentioned earlier, I keep Dosa batter ready in my refrigerator as well. The remaining recipes, I can prepare quickly.
Another, very popular trend in Indian street food is preparing smoky food like Dhaba style by giving charcoal smoke. I will discuss that in my future post. So stay tuned for street food secrets and more.
