Cookies are considered a tasty treat, even in India. Today, we look at an astonishing way of baking them on a wood fire oven!
No lab nor kitchen for Raj. His whole working space is a stall standing on top of a bicycle frame, in the pedestrian district of Laxhman Juhla.
There, he sells cookies, 100 Roupees for a box of 24 (nearly 1.40€). As a reminder, this is considered high end prices in India, and a for a reason: the cookies are sold still warm, taken right out of the oven before our gluttonous gaze!
The dough is made from white flour, butter, sugar, a small amount of clarified butter (to bring out the taste), and a (tiny) bit of water. He kneads 4kg of dough in one go, adding cardamom afterwards.
Raj then shapes the dough into small spheres of the same size, and flattens each of them with nothing but his hands.
It’s time to delicately arrange the flattened bits of dough on an stainless steel tray, and then put them inside this funny looking handcrafted wood oven!
More than the tasty cookies, here lies the truly interesting titbit: the ingenious, handcrafted and very functional oven.
Some very convincing results! Simply delicious.
The small tin oven has two shelves: the upper one is for cooking, while the lower one mainly keeps the cookies warm.
When Raj learnt I am a baker, he insisted that I show him my own take on the cookie recipe. Having trouble to understand each other, I finally decided to use lemons from a nearby stand, using the zest to create a whole new line of cookie: the (aptly) named lemon cookie!
Raj was pleasantly impressed and seemed very happy to have gained a new edge on his competition. I don’t know if he still sells these, and would be happy to know if he does (in case anyone happened to go there since march 2015!)
It’s high time we write about Tchaï, this hot beverage sold everywhere in India, from 5 to 25 Rs a glass.
The ethymology can be traced back to the Persian چای (chay), itself coming from the mandarin 茶 (chá) becoming Cha or Chai in various countries across Asia.
In Europe, we tend to use "Tchaï tea", a pleonasm or a mistake.
With that being said, Tchaï is still a very unusual way of enjoying tea.
It all start with your usual black tea, such as the one we saw in Ceylan.
This tea is boiled in milk, the very basis of the recipe. During my first trip to India, in Utakamund, I tasted Tchaï prepared with goat milk, slowly brewed for a whole day.
Various savors can be added depending on the taste: cardamom, ginger or even cinnamon. Tchaï is like pizza: the basis remains, but the flavors are endless.
As far as we are concerned, the best Tchaïs are the ones with the (not so) secret ingredients: a pinch of pepper or a hint of paprika.
Served scalding hot, one has to wonder which is the culprit for this pleasant tingling sensation in our throat: the sheer heat of the beverage, the strength of ginger, or the hint of pepper.
Here too, the boiling process happens in a portable clever handcrafted device.
The teapot is placed on the embers the chai walla (Tchaï vendor) carries with him and sell his beverage to various traders and merchants, who themselves offer it to their clients, or to sweeten tough negotiations.
The tea is filtered before being served. Selling Tchaï may look like a simple job, but it’s one of the pillars of Indian culture.
But enough talk, now we taste! Tchaï with butter cookies.
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