Pav Bhaji, where have you been all my life?

Our first Pav Bhaji.

In the midst of a competitive campaign for a local city council seat, my friend Minita Sanghvi took time out to teach an Indian cooking class. She gave us a choice of 3 dishes we could make. One of them was Pav Bhaji, whose picture showed what looked like a buttered roll sitting next to a vegetable stew. Parker House rolls in Indian cooking? Got to try that!

Minita explained this was a favorite street food in Mumbai, and that it was heavily influenced by Portuguese colonization of the west side of India in the 16^th century. The Portuguese brought tomatoes, potatoes, chili—and bread. Though the bread of that time would be nothing like today’s lighter white flour breads because the flour would have been darker and coarse ground and the yeast would come from a variety used to make alcoholic drinks.

The ingredient list included Pav Bhaji masala (affiliate link!), a special spice blend of “chilli, coriander, dry mango [aka anchoor powder], fennel, cumin, pepper, clove, cinnamon, black salt, big [black] cardamom & refined palmolein oil” according to the MTR package description. I went to my local halal market to find it and the friendly proprietor said “oh, you like pav bhaji?” in an approving tone and then “what are you going to do for the bread?” When I told him I was just learning to make it he sent me next door to Aldi where I found brioche dinner rolls, an excellent choice.

Cooking pav bhaji is fairly straightforward. You sauté chopped onions, garlic and green bell pepper in a lot of butter and add various spices as you go, then pour in a generous amount of chopped tomato. Separately, you boil until tender potatoes, peas, carrots and cauliflower. Blend it all in a blender or with a stick blender to the consistency you like (I chose slightly lumpy) and you’re done—except for the bread for which Minita used potato rolls from our local store. She added a good amount of butter to the skillet in which she had cooked the onions and heated the rolls on both sides till they were toasty and buttery, then sprinkled on Kashmiri chili powder (you could also use paprika) and salt and we were good to go.

I am not generally a fan of vegetarian Indian cooking because it is usually too bland for me, but this stuff was terrific, full of flavor and an excellent balance of warm spices, herbs and heat. I wasn’t sure what to do with the roll: make a sandwich? Dip it? Eat it in alternate bites with the stew? (Supposedly the sandwich was not invented until the 18^th century, though Wikipedia points out that people had been documented eating meats wrapped in a bready covering since ancient times.) Turns out all the above work well.

Minita says pav bhaji, in spite of its vegetarian ingredients, is considered “junk food” in her home—perhaps because of all that butter. Makes me feel even better about eating it. She won her election, by the way.

Here is our pav bhaji recipe, based on the ingredients we cooked.