Thursday, October 15, 2009

10 things I will miss when I leave India

Most foreigners like me who live in India love to hate India for one reason or another, but don't mistake the occasional ranting and raving for actual hatred. There are things we like, nee love, about India too.  It's just very easy to forget them.

So, I'd like to capture some of these things here.  I will take me a while to get through the entire list of 10 (in fact I haven't made the list yet) but let's start with this one.

The Andhra Meals

Palak dal, bhindi fry, pickle and rice.
(Courtesy kkalyan on Flickr)


I love a good Andhra style "meals" or "thali".  I haven't found an equivalent to this type of meal in any other society around the world, and if you haven't been to south India you probably don't know what I'm talking about. 

For a fairly small amount of money (20-120 rupees), you get a big plate (that's the thali) with a great variety of dishes in small bowls, and a pile of rice in the middle, and a couple of roti's or papadam on top. There is almost always yogurt (curd), some curries, a couple vegetable dishes, a salad (cucumber/carrot), and a sweet. At the lower end of the cost scale, you might just get rice, dal, and a veg.  In a south Indian version, you'd get more sloppy curries, and maybe some curd rice.  In a Northern one, dryer dishes, some bread, and a typical norther sweet.


A very nice looking Thali, from Jaisalmeer in North India.
(Courtesy of Larsa on Flickr)

The amazing thing is that it's all-you-can-eat. They will keep bringing any of the curries, vegetables, and rice in unlimited quantities until you are lying on the floor screaming "no more" "not another wafer thin mint".

One of the things I really enjoy about the cheap-n-tasty thali is the Indian practice of eating with your hand, without a spoon/knife/fork.  There is something really sensuous (almost in a dirty way) about smashing your curry, dal and vegetables into the rice, making a ball out of it and then shoving it into your mouth. 

For lots more photos, try a Compfight search for thali. 

And in the Bangalore area, "meals" is always plural.  You don't ask for a "meal" but a "meals".




Monday, October 12, 2009

Sewer cycle

Bangalore's sewers, when they exist, are for the most part "open".  See this for an example photo if you don't know what one looks like.  They are channels about a 80cm across and a meter deep that run in front of most buildings along the streets. 

If they are covered, they are covered with removable stones or concrete blocks. These then form the basis for what should be sidewalks, but in practice they are insufficient as such. As sidewalks, they are too uneven, too narrow, and since they are frequently missing stones, you must watch very carefully where you step lest you fall into the sewer.  Sidenote: that's why everyone in India walks in the street and a major reason why 4-lane roads (where they exist) usually have at most 2 passable lanes of traffic going less than 30kmph, but that's for another rant...



Someone enjoying the Open Sewer in Badami. Photo courtesy of OliviƩ

So why have these rough, uneven stones? Why not just cover the sewers entirely with smooth concrete?

First, let's recognize that Bangalore, a town of 6-8 million people depending on who you ask, has no organized solid waste disposal system to speak of.  Second, Bangaloreans by and large have no concept of using a garbage receptacle of any sort.  There are few if any public trash bins, and usually there isn't one within 100 yards of you anyway, so if you did have some trash and you didn't want to throw it on the ground, you'd have to pocket it until you found a canister.  The result: nearly everyone just throws their garbage on the ground.  And then it flies or falls into the sewer.

And if you live on a road with one of the aforementioned sewers, you can speed up this process and just throw your trash directly in the sewer.  Take a close look at all the non-biodegradeable stuff floating in that photo just there.

So this means that about once every 2 years, some unfortunate group of people are employed to clean out the sewers.  Lest you think this involves some high-pressure washing machinery and garbage trucks, recall where we are: India.  This means that people do it.  Why not use machinery?  People don't have to be imported from Germany and they don't break down.  They don't even require maintenance.  You just say "I need 100 workers at 100 rupees a day" and poof, they appear.  If 20 get sick and don't show up on day two, 20 more will appear looking for work.


These unlucky souls stand in the sewers (a couple inches deep with flowing waste in some cases) and dig out the solids, putting them in a big pile on the side of the road. This cleaning is done with their bare hands too, since apparently
shovels and other bronze-age implements are too expensive for this
work. Did I mention that most of these workers have no shoes?  That's right, they are standing barefoot in a river of poop, piss and chemical waste, then digging it out with their hands. 

A big sloppy, stinky pile of waste then appears on the side of the road in front of the restaurants, milk salesmen, butchers, even the florists.  It sits there for a month or so, drying out and blowing around until some other unlucky bunch of people comes along with a truck to haul it all "away".  I have no idea where this mythical "away" place is, but I'm suspecting it is the fields where my vegetables are grown.

And then the entire cycle starts all over again as people continue to throw their garbage in the sewers. As I was going to work this morning, I stopped at a stoplight in front of a small business.  The child working there was sweeping up all the plastic tea-cups, cigarette wrappers, and other trash.  When he finished making a nice pile, he picked it up and threw it into the brand new open sewer in front of his shop.

This is all just another mind-boggling inefficiency of India that I just don't understand.  Another side to "India Shining".

Afternote:
Light on the horizon: Chennai has banned the practice of manually cleaning sewers.  We all know the gap between law and practice in India, but still it's a good first step.


Thursday, October 01, 2009

Hyderabadi Biryani -- The hunt begins.

I've set myself a goal of learning to make a good Hyderabadi biryani before I leave India.

Best I can tell this is the general process:
  1. Marinate some meat and cook it a bit (cook it maybe half-way).
  2. Soak some rice and maybe cook it a bit (half-way).
  3. Layer the rice and meats in a big pot.
  4. Add some additional spices and some ghee.
  5. Cover tightly and cook for an additional 30mins until the rice and meats are both done.
This general recipe is deceptively simple I would say, which mean that the devil is in the details.  My time in India has shown me some good and lots of mediocre-to-bad biryani.

I do not intend to learn to make mediocre biryani.  ;-)

Some things I know already:
I will make chicken and mutton styles. Probably chicken more often than mutton.
Boneless mutton. Dark chicken meat. 
I will not bother with vegetarian biryani. 
I will use fresh whole spices, no mixes. (I'm throwing out all my old spices today.)
Saffron will be used, not colorings.
I will not use prepared garlic-ginger paste. That stuff is just nasty.
I will not worry about how much ghee goes in.  If I wanted to watch my calories, I wouldn't be making biryani.
I like it spicy. Most Indian food is not spicy enough for me but Andhra food (i.e. from Hyderabad) is.
I'm sensitive to over-salted food, so I'll probably be cutting back a bit on that part of most recipes.
Getting the rice properly cooked half-way before assembly will be a key to success.  Overcooking it will result in the mush that I've been served too many times in corporate canteens and cheaper restaurants.  Here's what Petrina Verma Sarkar says about this step:

"Cook till almost done. To determine when it has reached that stage, remove a few grains from the pot and press between your thumb and forefinger. The rice should mostly mash but will have a firm whitish core."
Manila Williams says:
You have to par cook the rice (meaning 3/4 cooked and rest will get cooked later). Do not over boil the rice. To check if the rice is done you can take a grain of rice out and press in between your thumb and forefinger. If the grain breaks into 3 parts, it means your rice is cooked just right.

Here's a promising recipe because it appears to be translated from another language (Telugu hopefully), and has typical Indian names for most items. I may give this one a try.  You have to like something that uses 3 t. chili powder for only 1/2 kg of meat.  Something is not right with the temperatures though.  Maybe mixing up Fahrenheit and Celsius?

Here is one I probably won't be trying.  1/2 t of chili powder? "Saffron Color".  Uhm, no thanks.

Recently there was an otherwise insipid article locally in which Sanjay Bahl of Royal Orchid Hotels made a telling comment: "Use a mix of cream, butter and saffron and pour it over the rice and cover it with a thin layer of par boiled rice after which you cover it with a lid and place it on dum."  I have yet to find a recipe that calls for cream or butter. In my experience, the fancy restaurants and hotels in India use WAY too much cream.  It's loaded into every curry dish to make it thicker and richer. Here I suspect the same thing is happening with biryani.  I can't imagine someone actually using cream and butter to make a biryani at home.  Am I wrong?  I suspect he's taking the saffron milk and using cream instead. 

This looks like a very good process in this video from Pakistan with Sanjeev Kapoor on TV1 showing the assembly and some of the details of the dum (vessel) loading.  He makes a seasoning potli (like a french bouquet garni) for the boiling of the rice.  He shows just how to layer in the meats and rice, and he uses a lot of yogurt (curd) to marinate the meat, which probably also makes the rice much richer in the end as it cooks off. This looks a lot like what I thought would be in the right recipe. Might start with this one as a basis.

Another video showing a mutton version, with tomatoes added to the meat while it cooks. Also he uses a 1:1 water:rice ratio to "partially cook" the rice in a rice cooker. The assembly here lacks a little in the "atmosphere" department, but it looks like they're having a huge party.

And on a lighter note: A rap about Hyderabadi Biryani. Awesome stuff that one...