On Tuesday night just gone, Fran & I went on a private foodies tour of places in Delhi.
The tours are private, small (minimum of two people & maximum of eight) & tailored on the principles of allergies & levels of food spiciness. The tours are organised by a company called “Delhi Food tours”.
The company is run by Prashant & Ayesha who only started it in January of this year.
On this night, the tour consisted of me, Fran & 2 x Brits in India for the first time. Prashant was our guide for the evening. He is a very nice chap: a former lawyer who decided to give the game away to concentrate on the thing he loves most: food !!
I like where he’s coming from !!
The tour takes you to 4-6 places around Delhi, where you experience a mix of foods from all over India, but with a Delhi twist.
Our first stop was to a tea shop where we tasted teas from all over the country. The majority of teas from India come from the North East states. The most famous & well known of these being Darjeeling. There is only one state in the south (Tamil Nadu) that produces tea.
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| At the tea shop about to taste test |
The southern states are more into coffee.
The next stop was the first in the food stops & we were to try out the Indian equivalent of “the late night kebab”. It’s basically a fried wrap, with chicken, onion & other yummy goodness that I can’t remember. It was so tasty yet so filling !!
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| The Indian late-night kebab |
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| Goodbye from the owner |
Our second stop took us to two eateries in the same area.
One was a place serving typical Southern Indian foods:
Lentil soup served with Idli (a steamed batter of fermented black lentils & rice) & Vada (a lentil doughnut)
Dosa (a fermented crepe made from rice batter & lentils) with a spicy potato filling – the Dosa is so light & breaks easily in your hand
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| The Idli & the Vada with the lentil soup in the background |
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| The yummy Dosa |
The second stop was a kebab place that served the most moist, tender & smokey-flavoured chicken & spicy goat kebabs. Yum !!
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| The yummy kebabs |
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| The owners of the kebab shop |
By this stage, we were all starting to feel a little bit full – yet we had one more stop to go.
Our meal at our final stop started off with a typical Mumbai chaat & panipuri (in Delhi it’s called Gol gappa).
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| Panipuri |
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| Chaat |
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| The "Deep fried fat" |
Chaat: a sweet & savoury mix of potato pieces, crispy fried bread, chickpeas, spices, yoghurt, a chutney of some description and pomegranate (the varieties are endless)
Panipuri: a small, crisp, round & hollow puri that you fill with potato, chickpeas & coriander water (pan). The puri is small, bite-sized & you eat in one gulp.
The next meal was, as Prashant described it, “deep fried fat” – a deep-fried puri bread (it literally dripped fat), with a spicy chick pea mix. The puri arrives all puffed up (as you can see in the photo). You poke it with your fork before you tuck in.
The bread was really dripping fat & mixed with a bit of the chickpea – it tasted so good !!
By this stage, however, eating was starting to be a bit of a struggle.
Then came the dessert !! Indian desserts are a bit over the top in their sugar content – this coming from someone who loves desserts !!
We had a selection consisting of: gulab juman (fried dough balls swimming in sugar syrup – my favourite), a selection of cashew or peanut-flavoured, marzipan-like substances (I really don’t know the name of these) & kulfi (it’s like an ice-cream but denser & creamier).
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| Gulab Juman - yummy !! |
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| The nut-based mazipan thing |
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| The Kulfi |
We all had a good time travelling around Delhi, savouring the many delights of Indian cuisine.
I recommend if you’re in Delhi, to give them a try.
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| The two Brits, Prashant & Fran at the end of the evening |
