This is the sort of thing we watch acclaimed international chefs tell us in food shows shot abroad. The final dish had to be topped with the finely chopped, raw, red onions, which I had junked.The perfect bite of Dal Pakwan apparently involves the coming together of the indulgent crunch of the pakwan, the soothing wholesomeness of the dal, the fiery tang of the chutney, and the pungent kick of the raw onions – a contrast of textures, flavours, and colours. The chutney in Dal Pakwan is made with fresh coriander, chilli and tamarind, Alka explained, and has to be added to the dal to pump up the flavours. The dal is meant to complement it and not compete with the pakwan for attention.This is different from the Bengali Luchi-Chholar Dal combination where all the flavours lie in the dal.
The dal is kept mild as the fried flat bread, the pakwan, is very heavy. Which is when she explained that I had eaten it wrong!Alka told me that I should have added the chutney to the dal instead of discarding it! She explained that the dal is intentionally lightly flavoured with just a bit of turmeric, hing ( asafoetida), cumin and occasionally green chillies. I told her how I was a bit underwhelmed by my Dal Pakwan experience. Years later I met Alka Keswani who writes the vegetarian Sindhi blog, Sindhi Rasoi. Luchi is a refined flour or maida-based bread too but unlike the pakwan, which was solid and dense, is light and airy.The dal, in this case, turned out to be rather bland and the pakwan too ghee soaked and I didn’t take much to the dish. One of my favourite Bengali dishes is the Chholar Dal my granny would make with luchi. I discarded these and sat down to eat the dal (lentils) and the flat bread.The taste of the dal seemed familiar and then I realised that it used the same Bengal gram that is used in our Bengali Chholar Dal. There was a packet of chutney too and some chopped onions. Image credit: Alka KeswaniI opened the paper bag that they gave me at Tharu and saw that there was a very crisp and thick, refined flour-based deep-fried flat bread and a pale yellow-coloured dal packed along with it. The next Sunday I decided to ditch my usual Sunday breakfast of fried eggs, sausages and toast and got home a serving of Dal Pakwan from Tharu. That it was famous for selling a Sindhi breakfast dish called Dal Pakwan on Sunday mornings. Over the next few weeks I noticed that Tharu’s would get pretty crowded for some reason on Sunday mornings.I mentioned this at work one day when a Sindhi colleague explained that Tharu is a Sindhi sweet shop. The sweets looked pretty different from what I was used to and were expensive too though the shop looked pretty basic. Our landlord then, a fairly cheerful gentleman, was Sindhi too.Opposite our house was a sweet shop called Tharu.One day I stepped into Tharu’s to check out the sweets. A community which migrated to India from the Sindh region in Pakistan during partition. I remembered this wonderful story when I moved into the neighbourhood of Khar in Mumbai a few years later and rented our first apartment in Mumbai.
0 kommentar(er)
