The Amritsar Food Diaries
It is a great food city and the bread capital of India
Ihave been to Amritsar many times. And I always thought the food was great. But is it really one of India’s great food cities? I was never sure.
So when I went back for a weekend, I warned my wife that all we would do is eat. I requested Surjeet Chahal, a young and bright IPS officer I know to give me a list of places to try. (I already had several other lists sent in by friends.) Surjeet went one better. It was the weekend, he said, so he would ask two off-duty police officers who were great foodies, to help.
Which is how I came to meet Inspector Anoop Saini and ASI Bhagwant Singh, both veterans of the force. They say that cops always know the best dhabas and I am here to tell you that they are right. Anoop and Bhagwant took me to place after place, ensuring that I never had a bad meal. And I had some really great ones.
It would be too tedious to write about every place we went to but here are the highlights of what I discovered.
KULCHA
Amritsar is the kulcha capital of India. I am sure there are places in the rest of Punjab where the kulchas are as good (Ludhiana, for instance), but I have long had an enduring love affair with Amritsar’s kulchas.
Anoop and Bhagwant took me to innumerable kulcha places but the ones I really liked were Brother’s (part of a chain – I went to the branch in the old city) Kulwant (near the Golden Temple), and Kulcha Land (a subject of some controversy because its kulchas are different). At each place I spent time in the kitchen trying to figure out exactly what they were doing.
The most helpful were the owners of Kulwant. This is a small (but famous) place with no room for a kitchen. So they have built one on a mezzanine. As there is only a small and awkward staircase, they make the kulchas upstairs and then lower them down in a bucket tied to a rope to waiting servers. It is a slightly bizarre system but it works.
The secret of a good kulcha is layering. The flour is rolled into thin layers, which are then coated in ghee and put together to create the kulcha. You can use whatever stuffing you like but potatoes and cauliflower seemed to be the most common.
To bake a kulcha, you must use a tandoor (non-gas fired is always the best) where the temperature has been kept low. The kulcha is stuck to the wall of the tandoor and then cooks slowly (around 10 minutes).
The guy who operates the tandoor has no thermometer so he guesses what the right temperature is. He also has no way of checking when the kulcha is ready to be pulled out so he uses his own judgement.
Why don’t we get kulchas of Amritsar quality in Delhi? Well, partly because you need an expert kulcha guy with tremendous judgement to make the right calls. In a kulcha shop, there will be upto 10 kulchas in the tandoor at any given time. Each kulcha has been put in at a different time. The kulcha guy needs to recall when he stuck each kulcha to the tandoor’s walls so that he can judge when it is ready.
The other problem is tandoor temperature. My guru, the great chef Manjit Gill, explained it to me. Most Indian restaurants have only one tandoor in which they cook everything. But you simply cannot cook a kulcha at the tandoor temperature required for kebabs. Even if you have two tandoors, there is still a problem because a naan or a tandoori roti require higher temperatures than a kulcha.
The key to a good kulcha, Manjit says, is the manner in which you get the ghee to slowly melt and impart a flakiness to the kulcha. That can only happen at a low temperature.
So the only place you can get good kulchas is one where there is a designated kulcha tandoor. And outside of Punjab, there aren’t too many of those.
Anoop was keen on Kulcha Land, which he said had the best kulchas in Amritsar. They were different: thinner and crispier but even more delicious for that. When I posted pictures of those