Vada Pav

To a Puneite living abroad, especially the US, the worst part of the journey home isn’t the eighteen-plus hour plane ride home, it’s the miserable three and a half hour car ride to Pune after landing in Bombay. It goes something like this. After careful calculation of vacation days the momentous decision to visit home is reached a couple of months before the actual journey and thus begins the saga of finding the perfect (cheapest) ticket. Browsing through many sites, with multiple windows open at one time, carefully considering the layovers, and chat consultations with fellow desis, all done in office time, a purchase is made. No sooner does the itinerary hit the inbox, it is forwarded to at least 4 family members and 8 friends. And if you’re lucky, they won’t all show up to pick you up at the airport in one car. The day of the journey arrives and the sojourner leaves for the airport with maximum allowable baggage and a list of explanations for Indian customs about how it is all within the allowance.

After an 18-hour journey and up to 6 award-winning airline meals (I don’t know of a single airline that doesn’t claim that their food isn’t award-winning) the jumbo jet touches the motherland. After the gastro-intestinal assault, it’s time for olfactory annihilation, and the Mumbai air is only happy to oblige. Thus arrives the prodigal son (or daughter) to the motherland weary, chaffed and slightly constipated. No matter what fly-by-night operator you use, a trip originating from the US somehow ends up reaching Bombay around midnight. Once out of the plane your first greeting is the indifference of the immigration officer at CST, the delay in anything appearing on the luggage conveyor and the harassment by customs. These are all just mere hurdles between you and the warm hug that you’ll receive from your posse waiting for you outside the airport if you know where the exit is. Life would be so much simpler if CST airport didn’t change so damn much every 12 months. The last leg of the journey to Punyanagri thus starts.

This time around, I had the pleasure of taking the Bombay-Pune midnight express twice as my wife and I arrived in Pune a week apart and I had to go back to bring her to Pune. Her flight arrived at 2:30 a.m. and after one Akshay Kumar brought the airport to a standstill for an hour, she emerged out of the door at around 4:00 a.m. We started for Pune with one of my dearest friends. Over the bridges and through poorly designed signage, unnecessary construction and everything Bombay can throw at you we finally made it to the express highway. This journey is truly awful, but there are some bright spots along the way like the Khandala Ghat and the new truck stops that are for some reason called malls. We stopped at one such mall, the one before Khandala Ghat starts. I would say that I can’t remember the name, but the truth is that at 5:45 a.m., I really didn’t care what the name of that place was. It wasn’t as busy as it would be during the day, but at a quarter to six, what place really is. My firang wife pointed to the glass case filled with the “orange potato dumplings”. And against my better judgment, we all had the orange potato dumplings. Two sandwiched in buns with green chilies and one without. My wife didn’t think deep-fried potato sandwiched in white bread was a healthy option. That was until she saw the culinary delight known as the bread pakora. It wasn’t the greatest Vada-Pav I have had, but it was definitely the first one I had just before sunrise, and after a night of no sleep and 250 km, it tasted pretty darn good with a cup of chai in a flimsy plastic cup.

Ingredients

For stuffing

• 4 Potatoes boiled and peeled
• 1 Onion finely chopped (optional)
• 6 Chillis finely chopped
• 6 Garlic cloves crushed
• 2 tbsp Ginger grated or paste
• 1 Lemon juiced
• 1/2 cup Cilantro / Coriander finely chopped
• 1 tsp salt

For batter

• 2 cups Besan (Chickpea flour)
• 1 tsp Chili powder
• 1 tsp Turmeric
• 1/2 tsp Cumin Powder
• 1/4 tsp Baking soda
• 1 tsp Salt

Method

• In a pan mash potatoes, onion, chilis, garlic, ginger, lemon, coriander and salt into a solid mixture making sure that the potatoes don't have any large lumps.
• Make small balls the size of a golf ball
• Place aside
• Mix besan, chilli powder, turmeric, cumin, baking soda and salt in a bowl
• Add water and mix till it turns into a thick batter
• Heat oil in a wok
• Dip the potato balls in the batter and deep fry till golden
• Take a Pav and tear it open keeping them together at one edge
• Place one hot Vada in the Pav and serve with deep fried green chilies on the side