I recently returned from a month-long trip to India and Japan with lots of new recipes under my belt (having eaten rather too well I mean that both figuratively and literally!). I’ll be sharing some of them in the coming weeks and I thought I’d start with one that is hugely popular throughout India: batata vada. This is a sort of potato (batata) fritter (vada) found just about everywhere, from fancy restaurants to school cafeteria menus. But it is most commonly eaten as an on-the-go snack called “pav vada” in the street food capital of India, Mumbai, where it is famously stuffed between loaves of bread (“pav“) slathered with a spicy green coriander or red garlic chutney. A vegetarian hamburger as it were. Roadside stalls selling pav vada are as numerous as those hawking that other snack beloved of Mumbaikers: chutney sandwich.
An aside: I’ve mentioned before how much Indian cuisine owes to the outside world but only recently did it occur to me that batata, the word for potato in many Indian languages, is not of Indian origin. This realization hit as I was making one of my favorite Spanish dishes, patatas bravas. Patata? Batata? There must be a connection, no? Close, but not quite. Batata is actually Portuguese for potato. (This may be well known to you polyglot readers but I’m quite rubbish at languages!) And that got me curious about the origin of the word “pav” (also spelt “pao“), what western-style bread is called in India. The simple and now unsurprising answer appears to be: pão is the Portuguese word for bread. (To be sure there are other explanations – some of them quite wild – but this one is the most obvious.) Incidentally, pão is pronounced with a nasal twang which is perhaps where the Japanese get their word for bread: pan (パン).
But back to batata vada. The recipe is pretty simple although, admittedly, it does call for deep-frying, which can be both daunting and messy. But if you don’t mind it (here are some useful hints) then these makes for a delicious snack. Or an appetizer at a party, although I must warn you that they are highly addictive and you won’t be able to make enough to satisfy your guests!
Ingredient note: Indian chickpea flour, also called gram flour or besan, is made out of chana dal, a split and hulled form of a rather different variety of chickpea known as Bengal gram or kala chana (black chickpeas) rather than the garbanzo variety you may be more familiar with. It is easy to find at Indian grocery stores.
Yield: Makes 10-12 vada
Prep Time: 20 minutes
Cook Time: 20 minutes
Total Time: 40 minutes