Here are some streetside scenes from Jaipur, where plenty of folks were selling fruits & vegetables, dry snacks in a bag, and of course, my favorite chaat. Now, with all of the notorious stories about foreigners not being accustomed to food in India, I admittedly was a bit hesitant to dive into this at first. Some guy puking right in front of one of these vendors wasn't exactly a solid endorsement either. But after passing so many chaat guys selling all sorts of goods, I finally came across a pani puri guy with quite a big customer base, and I capitulated to curiosity.
It was a bit different. This guy handed over a little metal dish, upon which he made a single pani puri (rather than the half dozen that I'm used to). It turned out to be pretty darned spicy. I liked it so much that I went back for another one, whereupon he recommended a "sweet puri" that was filled with a red liquid and yogurt that fortunately wasn't too sweet after all. Oh, the beauty of street food...it was only 10 Rupees (US$0.25).
So did I ever get the "Delhi belly" after all of the food this past week? Fortunately not. Then again, my exposure was minimal, as we were stuck in corporate-sponsored hotel buffets for the past couple of days (one of which, at the Sheraton in Delhi, was pretty darned good though, especially the Western Indian section of the spread). I was pretty happy when I finally got a chance to eat some real streetside chaat, and rolling the dice this time fortunately worked out in my favor.
3 comments:
oh.... but you can get sick from hotel buffets in India too! I've always been warned not to eat street food, mainly because the oil for frying could be a bad combination of oils.
The best place to get sick in India is by attending a wedding banquet! The food is wonderful, but food poisoning is common.
serving them one by one is the actual way real street side pani puris are handed out at stalls all over indiae. and you can ask the stall owner/server to adjust the sweetness to your taste. the beauty of the little steel bowl is that it collects all the overflowing pani (water) from the puris that you can satisfyingly drink up at the end. *slurp*
What a coincidence,during my Jaipur vist in 2009 I had visited the 'Agarwal Pakodi Bhandar' which is quite famous for its Pyaz (onion)Lahsun (garlic)Pakodis. These Pakodis are delicious but very very hot and spicy. Jaipur is one of my favourite food destinations.
You may like some of the pics from Jaipur here -
http://travalok.blogspot.com/2010/09/clicking-away-in-jaipur.html
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