Serious Eats: Recipes
Cook the Book: Vada Pav, the Indian 'Burger'
Photograph from scaredy_kat on Flickr
Roughly 80 percent of the population of India is vegetarian, so why is a burger one of the most popular fast foods there? Well, it's not a burger in the traditional sense, it's vada pav, a potato burger. Vada pav is eaten all over western India as a snack or a quick meal on the go.
Monica Bhide provides a great recipe for making vada pav at home in her new cookbook, Modern Spice. These spiced potato patties are dressed up with two chutneys and sev, thin, salted gram flour noodles for crunch. Bhide recommends using traditional Indian pav bread if you can find it, but if you can't, plain burger buns work just fine.
Win 'Modern Spice'
As always with our Cook the Book feature, we have five (5) copies of Modern Spice to give away this week.