Pav Bhaji: Top Tier Vegetarian Indian Street Food

Bhaji is a word in several Indian languages–Hindi, Gujarati, and Marathi at least–meaning vegetables or greens. Culinarily, the term describes 2 different vegetable preparations of which I’m aware. The first is a type of fritter made with chopped vegetables, often onions, suspended in a batter of chickpea flour and deep-fried, similar to a pakora.

The second is as part of my own personal favorite vegetarian Indian dish, a spicy vegetable curry served with soft bread rolls called pav bhaji. I suppose that first I should state the caveat that this is really not a sandwich by any stretch of the imagination, and I’m not here to convince you otherwise. The curry is generally too soft to serve inside the rolls, which are instead used for dipping and scooping. Other Indian breads, such as naan or paratha, can also be used–I particularly like the combination of bhaji with garlic naan. However, we at the Tribunal are interested in the intersection of breads with other foods in whatever form we find it, and also–like I said, this dish is a personal favorite of mine. It’s about time I shined a light on it.

We covered the history of the bread roll called pav in a recent piece on a similar-but-meaty dish called kheema pav a few months ago–these leavened bread rolls were made by local cooks at the demand of Portuguese colonizers in Goa in the 16th or 17th Century, and made their way along with escaped Goans. up the coast to Mumbai over the next few hundred years to become a popular street food item there. They even take their name from the Portuguese word for bread–pão.

As for the bhaji–the story goes that the Civil War in the United States in the latter half of the 19th Century saw a dramatic decrease in the export of American cotton, and textile mills in Mumbai ramped up their operations to meet the demand that American slave labor was no longer providing. The laborers at the mills worked long hours with only short breaks for lunch, and needed cheap, filling, and quick meals. Street food vendors filled the gap by making a spicy curry out of mashed leftover vegetables and serving it with soft, fluffy, filling bread rolls.

I first encountered pav bhaji at my local Indian market, a small Gujarati grocery called Swagat Foods on 159th Street in Oak Forest, IL–the same place I first encountered vada pav and dabeli. For some years now, I’ve been buying pint containers of the curry there from a small refrigerator near the checkout line, and bags of pav from a nearby shelf. I’ve been happy enough with their version that I have never really ordered it anywhere else, nor tried to make it myself.

This month, I changed that.

The first weekend in November was sunny and unseasonably warm, and after an afternoon throwing discs around at The Meadows in Tinley Park–and spending too much time looking for errant drives in the tall grass–I walked a mile east to Samosa King, a short order carryout spot selling Indian street food out of the back of a BP gas station at the corner of 167th Street and Oak Park Avenue. Samosa King isn’t built for dine-in but they do have a row of chairs along a high counter that runs the length of their window and a single formica booth in the corner. They served the dine-in version of pav bhaji in takeout containers with a paper plate underneath.

I made this observation recently while researching pav bhaji recipes:

I'm looking at pav bhaji recipes and every decent looking recipe I see adds absolutely stunning amounts of butter, then garnishes with more butter at the end. No wonder it's so frikkin good

— Sandwich Eater (@jimbehymer.bsky.social) 2024-11-10T16:55:43.299Z

That observation seems almost tailor-made for the version of pav bhaji I experienced at Samosa King. It was perhaps even less photogenic than pav bhaji is in general, with reflective pools of liquid fat visibly covering much of the surface of what was a much darker, duller bhaji than most I’ve seen. But it tasted terrific, nicely spicy–I asked for it medium after they warned me that the “hot” version would be “Indian-hot”–and simply swimming in melted ghee.

The following weekend, I recruited my family to investigate a new Indian restaurant in Orland Park called Priya’s Kitchen. Two of us ordered, respectively, butter chicken and chicken tikka masala, dishes that were perfectly fine representations of the styles but that I did not bother photographing. My eldest ordered a dosa, massive but thin and crisp, rolled up into a tube, served with a small bowl of South Indian soup called sambar and a selection of chutneys. In addition to the pav bhaji I’d gone there to try, I also requested an order of Hyderabadi onion samosas. After we ordered, the restaurant owner came to the table and warned me that the samosas would be spicier than potato samosas and wanted to be sure I knew what I was getting into. I assured him we’d be fine. (We were, they were spicy but not overwhelming)

The pav bhaji was the best-tasting item on the table, though. Thick, chunky, studded with bits of cilantro stems between vegetables otherwise mashed into unrecognizability, it was served with 2 pav rolls, buttered and toasted, with finely diced red onions, a lemon wedge, and some sliced fresh jalapeno for garnishes. It tasted like…

Well, a good pav bhaji has the underlying flavor of vegetables, boiled potato and cauliflower, green bell peppers and peas, flavors that are discernible but a mild enough base that it takes a distant back seat to the sweet and pungent onion, the deep and lasting umami of the tomato the brightness of cilantro, the sharpness of chilies, the aromatic spices of the masala, the clove and cinnamon and coriander and cumin, the sweet licorice of fennel and the smoky menthol of black cardamom and the sour fruitiness of green mango powder. It all comes together into something that you almost have to taste to believe.

You may think you won’t like a vegetarian curry. You are wrong.

DIY Pav Bhaji

I used recipes from online sources to make this dish–I used the pav bhaji recipe, including the masala recipe, from a site called Cook with Manali, and I used a pav recipe from a YouTube video by Nadhi Cooks. I do not claim credit for these recipes, but I am including them at the bottom of this article because after 10 years of doing this site, I’ve found that more often than not, sources disappear and links become broken, and I can no longer find some of the recipes I enjoyed in the early days of the site.

I enjoyed this pav bhaji and I’d like to make it again some day.

Also, I specifically used Amul butter in making these. I have talked about Amul cheese before, a processed cheese from India that features Water Buffalo milk, which gives the cheese a slightly sour character I find appealing. Similarly, this Amul butter features a blend of Water Buffalo and dairy cow milk, but the slight tang of the water buffalo milk seems even more pronounced in this less processed product. You can use whatever butter you like when making this, but I’ll buy this Indian butter again in the future.

I used the last harvest of tomatoes from my garden, which I pulled earlier this month and let sit on the counter for a few days before cooking the bhaji. They were mostly yellow beefsteak tomatoes and a single small red one, making my bhaji lighter in color than many I’ve seen. Street food stalls often serve a bright red bhaji, or so I’ve read, and the packaged boil-in-bag version of pav bhaji I’ve bought on a few occasions also seems to be a brighter red than the others I’ve encountered. Some home cooks add a few drops of red food coloring to replicate that–I’m not going to bother. I think my bhaji looks great as is–though a sloppy pot of orange and green mush is not going to win any beauty contests, of course.

I used maybe just a bit too much butter making the pav, if such a thing is possible. The pav preparation is very much like a dinner roll recipe, with dry yeast activated in warm milk with a little sugar, then combined with all-purpose flour and salt. The dough is also enriched with fat though–butter in this case, or more specifically the Amul butter I raved about earlier. After thorough kneading, an initial rise and then a secondary proofing in a buttered pan, the rolls are brushed with milk, baked until brown, then brushed with even more melted butter.

Pan-toasting the pav in even more butter before serving may seem like too much of a good thing; gilding the lily as they say, or in this case buttering the buttery butterbread. But it may simply be an authentic expression of Indian street food: according to my friend Chris, who I assume was speaking metaphorically about a pav bhaji he ordered in India:

One of the ones I had in India the bun was so heavily buttered I saw God

So I cut open the pav rolls, and I spread on even more of the good, slightly tart/fermented tasting Amul butter and toasted them on a griddle, and served them with a bowl of the bhaji along with diced red onion, chopped cilantro, and a couple wedges of lemon on the side for garnish.

And now that I know how to make pav bhaji–and this homemade version is as good as or better than any I’ve ordered, including my long-time favorite version from Swagat Foods–I never have to buy it again!

I will anyway. It is, after all, my favorite vegetarian Indian dish.