Adventures in Belco: Bread Pakora

A week or so ago, a mate on facebook posted that she’d picked up someone else’s Indian Takeaway from the fabulous (but “under new management” so the website doesn’t work) Bharat International Indian Supermarket. The food that she got by accident she described as “battered deep-fried Indian-spiced cheese toasties” but she also revealed that she was too scared to try it. In the comments on the post, someone else let on that they knew it was a Bread Pakora, and that it would usually be filled with potato, rather than cheese.

Today I found myself in Belconnen, in the same street at Bharat, so I knew there was only one thing to do…

As you can see, my camera lens is already greased up, simply from being close to this fabulous item. I took this photo in my car, while the pakora was still hot. Now, in case you haven’t followed the link above, let me explain what it actually is. It’s a sandwich, filled with a potato curry, coated with a spicy chickpea flour (besan) batter and then deep fried. It’s pretty weird.

I took my first bite just after this photo was taken, and was seriously underwhelmed. The corners of this sandwich were very much just batter and bread. And oil. So much oil. Two years ago, the mere thought of eating this would have made me feel sick. I had a large gall stone (which seems to have all but disappeared) so fat was not an option in my diet at all. Now that it’s not an issue, I go for fried things occasionally, but they still make me feel a bit weird. So the sandwich, so much bread, but the batter had a really nice spicy note, and a bit of chilli. The sandwich came with a little container of what I think of as a tamarind dipping sauce, but googling around, it seems more likely that it’s a thin tamarind chutney. Because I was now driving home, my bites of bready, battery, oil were unmitigated by the chutney, and it was all a bit overwhelmingly bland.

Once I got home, I broke open the container and went to town on the rest of the sandwich.

Here you can see the potato filling, the batter, the bread, and the sauce all working together. The potato filling was pretty good, but there could certainly be more of it, and it could have been spread more to the corners of the sandwich, but again, a good amount of spice and chilli. The sauce was acidic and cut through the grease really well, which was just what I was needing around about now, and had its own chilli kick. The bread itself was some fluffy unremarkable supermarket deal, and ultimately pretty redundant. I’d’ve been just as happy (more so, probably) with balls of the potato curry, battered and fried and served with the tamarind chutney, but then it wouldn’t be a bread pakora, would it?

Crit

I’m a mother of two boys. I work selling organic produce to gullible locals, and in my spare time I run as far as I can. Oh, and I live in Australia, married to a US citizen.