The Man Running a 50-Year-Old Paratha Stand on the Delhi Streets | Street Eats | Bon Appétit

I'm salivating right now.

It's evening in Delhi.

Hundreds of people are streaming out of their offices

hungry and for 40 years

Sardarji Parathewala has been serving

beautiful hot buttery flaky parathas

up to all these hungry people lining the streets.

A paratha is essentially

a flatbread, a stuffed flatbread, but the magic is in the butteriness of it.

It's a meal in one, it's a snack, it's comfort food.

Let's go see on.

>> Careful, this is a live operation.

Don't knock over a propane tank or we're all in trouble.

Ah, just the smell is

This is a three-generation family business.

When he was about 10 to 12 years old, he used to help his dad out.

Just like his son, Happy right now is helping out in expediting.

Once his father passed away, he took over the seat

and now he sits here in the same place

that his father sat.

He's got one, two, three, four bowls of stuffings.

Okay, and this way you get a little bit of all the flavors

all incorporated into it.

Lots of fresh onion and you can see just the mountain that's been cut

back there and piled up in the bags ready for the next order.

The cutting board is basically

2 by 4 that's been worked over so that you can actually see where

it sort of got hollowed out in the middle a little bit. Here we go.

There's the cutting board.

Somewhere there's a fence missing a post and it'll be back here,

but the magic is in what's happening right now.

Let's see him go. Here we go. Here we go. Here we go.

Made into a ball,

dusted in flour, hollowed out,

little stuffing in the inside.

It's moving so fast I can barely keep track of what he's doing

and then rolled out

without tearing the dough.

40 years of practice, right?

This is how it looks.

And straight on the grill.

I mean, what's blowing my mind is that he's putting in jagged bits of

onions and potatoes, stuff that if I try to do at home would just

tear right through the parotta.

Obviously, with the technique that he's got going,

these parottas are not tearing.

The ingredients are not poking through and bursting.

So, he's grabbing a handful of dough.

Looks about just somewhere between a golf ball and a tennis ball in size.

He's really almost massaging

it in his hands to get it super smooth.

A liberal dusting of the flour.

And then in this just really amazing

sort of movement, he's

hollowing it out, stuffing

it, pinching off a little bit of the extra on the top.

You can see the part that he pinched off.

And then he's got probably

the amount of pressure that he needs to make this parotta

down to an art form.

By stuffing it in the middle

and then enclosing it and pushing it down and rolling it out, he's making

sure that the stuffing spreads perfectly even.

So, that all the way to the edge,

the potato stuffing fills that parotta,

you know, in that thin little disc.

This is nothing like a crepe

or a pancake with toppings.

He's not making something and then just sprinkling stuff and folding it over.

But it's essential to the nature of the parotta is that the stuffing's inside

and that it's flattened to this disc and cooked. Ghee, clarified butter.

It's got a very high smoke point and you can see how hot the tawa is.

Butter would scorch on this,

which is why they're using ghee.

The smoke point of this is extremely high.

You're not going to burn it.

They don't skimp on the ghee.

It's sort of partly griddling, partly frying.

I mean, think of, you know, pancakes with butter on a flat top.

Just think of how the butter helps the pancake just become golden

and fluffy and crispy.

And yet it's not greasy.

So, he's making sure that it doesn't burn on either side. It's cooking perfectly.

This is so hot.

Once the internal temperature gets to the right temperature, it starts puffing.

And what he's doing by pressing

is essentially helping create the air pockets inside

from one side to the other and it'll start to puff up slowly.

From the rolling to a parotta

hitting that plate, I'm estimating

about a minute 10 seconds.

The ultimate Indian parotta is Refuses to count.

He doesn't have time to count.

It's just happening, but we can estimate.

We can take a guess.

We can just take a guess based on what time he starts and what

time he finishes at a product about a minute going out.

Look at the puff.

Look at the puff.

And that's what the pressing on the sides does.

Pushes the air into the metal

and that steam that pocket in the inside is making sure that the

stuffing is perfectly cooked

and moist and delicious.

The top burners are cast iron.

I mean, he's probably cranking,

woo, 150 to 100,000 BTUs per burner.

I mean, it is insane.

I know I'm exaggerating a little bit.

It's the same reason why pizza cooked in a 900°

oven, it's got that butteriness to it, that softness to the chew cuz the

dough is cooked in about 90 seconds.

So, you got the dough cooked but while it's still retaining its pliability.

I am so envious, so jealous of cooking on the streets of India.

I mean, you got a propane tank in the middle of the street.

These tables look like, you know, they're about one bump away from collapsing.

This rolling block of his made out of marble is balanced on just some

watered up newspaper over there, but probably at the perfect angle for him to work.

Um, the rolling pin rests perfectly on the top.

It's about economy of motion.

It's about economy of placement.

It's about essentially everything

being within arm's reach

and and keeping it compact.

I I often argue that our American kitchens, professional kitchens are too big.

They're just too big.

There's too much movement back and forth.

If you could just stand in one place and rotate and reach everything you

need, um, that's essentially what what street cooking looks like, you know, without

worrying about fire safety drills.

Um, this little phone here is streaming a live feed

from the Golden Temple in Amritsar,

one of the holiest sites for Sikhism.

This is their their why.

This is their purpose.

He rolls the incense by himself by hand in the morning.

But, of course, the takeout ordering

is announcing right next to it.

So, you know, religion, commerce,

I mean, you can do both, right?

So, let's go around this side.

Let's make What all do we have in here?

It's just a nice pungent,

spicy, sour, tart, acidic

condiment, a pickle to

you know, the sort of ghee-laden paratha so it cuts through it.

So, there you see a plate being made.

And then a little bit of green chutney on the side. I'm losing it.

I got to I got to order one cuz if I don't,

I'm just going to be starting to slobber all over my face.

So, let me go in and place.

So, one aloo with some raita on the side. No green chutney. Thank you.

Oh, I'm getting the special butter paratha treatment.

All right, well, this is going to be

You see the difference in the smoke point between the ghee and the butter?

The ghee immediately the butter immediately smoked up.

I can smell the browning of the butter, but he's moving fast

and making sure that that way I don't end up with a charred

butter paratha, but a delicious butter paratha.

All right, let's go get my paratha.

Come on over for the condiments.

And there's my raita,

and there's my pickle,

and just a sprinkle of that masala,

the raita masala on top.

You can pretty much eat this any way you want.

You can eat it just by itself.

Or you could add a little bit of pickle to it, or you could

add a little raita to it.

My favorite is the double dunk.

I'm going to make sure it gets a little pickle on one side,

and make sure it gets a little

of the raita on the other

I'm salivating right now.

This is the real deal, guys. It's comfort food.

This is mac and cheese.

Whether it's butter or whether it's ghee, the way it hits that

hot tava and smokes and browns.

It has a nuttiness to the bread.

And you can see the color

of the paratha has completely changed.

It's those milk solids in there that are caramelizing

and becoming a part of the whole experience.

So, I just discovered

that the anda paratha, the egg paratha, is not what I thought it was going to be.

I just thought they'd like put an egg inside the paratha, like maybe an

omelet or a scramble or something.

No, they cook it in a very special way.

Let's go take a look at how they do it. All right.

So, mix anda here.

And what did you put in there? Chili powder? And and salt?

Oh, he pokes a hole.

POURS IT IN THE >> I LOVE IT.

YEAH, I LOVE THIS.

MUSTARD I thought I thought he Wow, okay.

I thought he was going to put the egg on the flat top and

then put the paratha on it, which basically would make it like a kati

roll type paratha, but no, the egg's inside. Wow.

So, now just the egg's cooking in the inside

along with the pyaz? Just plain anda? Aloo? Okay.

So, this is a potato

with the egg added to the inside of this.

I guess he doesn't need to salt it because probably the potatoes are already well seasoned.

There's a lot of salt going on already.

And this is the cool part.

Poking of the Perfect

pour not a drop

outside the I can barely pour chai into a cup straight.

And this guy's putting two eggs

in the inside of a sleeve, a pocket.

Gives the idea of a hot pocket a whole new definition.

The last one was a single egg.

I got the double egg.

Uh what's the difference in price? 20 rupees more? Amazing.

A aloo paratha made by hand from scratch.

We saw every step of the process.

With two eggs in it, it's 70 rupees.

That is about maybe

60 cents, 70 cents.

70 rupees, less than a dollar.

This is new to me.

It's the first time I've seen

an egg cooked inside of a parotta.

God damn, that's hot. Woo. Oh. Oh. Oh. That's beautiful. That looks gorgeous. Spiced parotta, good. Spiced potatoes, good. Buttered parotta, good. Egg, good.

All three together, good. Mhm. Mhm. Fantastic.

So, they say in the restaurant business, location, location, location.

Well, this location is kind of remarkable.

We've got a main highway right behind us, where folks can see

the parottas being made.

They know where the place is, so they can pull off on one of

the feeder roads, park, and come over

We associate going out with going to a restaurant, right?

That's what dining out in our minds is, an eatery, a place to eat.

But, I would argue

that the street itself is a restaurant.

There's something, I don't know, like cozy

about just standing next to a stranger,

sharing an experience, making small talk. I see families.

I wouldn't trade this for a Michelin star restaurant.

To me, this is the experience

that I'm constantly seeking,

that I'm constantly looking for,

eating on the street.