Sorry about the long break since the last post but things have been out of control! Doesn’t mean I haven’t been cooking, just that the photos and posts weren’t available or ready! I have a few drafts and almost finished posts lined up and I’ll be posting them in no particular order. Let’s begin…!
This particular experiment was an attempt to get AK to finally shut up about this street food specialty from Bangalore. I may have mentioned that he went to college there and spent another 4 years at his first job – which is the time in each of our lives when we appreciate cheap, delicious street food the most! And he talks about it ALL the time. So in my head, I think it’s this overrated and blown-out-of-proportion snack.
I have to say I changed my mind this past weekend – although I made it at home vs the unhygienic (read delicious) conditions of the street vendor!
A teeny bit of light has to be shed on the name! It’s just a fancy, multi-lingual version of Egg Butter Bun. Unfortunately, the South Indian pronunciation of Egg often becomes Aig (sounding like Ek = Hindi for the number 1) and seems like an order for 1 Butter Bun! Some genius came up wit calling it Dim (Bengali for Egg) instead. Although how and why the Bengali word was used instead of the logical Kannada one is beyond my comprehension!
Anyhow, here’s what I did:
Boiled 5 eggs, slightly soft. Even for something so simple, my mother’s calculation is stuck in my head. Here are her instructions for boiled-eggs-for-dummies:
- Place the eggs in a pan
- Cover with water and add 1 tsp salt to the water (helps to prevent the egg shells from cracking!)
- Bring to a boil on high heat
- As soon as it hits a rolling boil, put on the timer on your watch/ phone/ microwave – or just watch the clock – for 7 minutes for the perfect hard-boiled egg!
- For this recipe I wanted the yolk sort of soft & creamy but not runny so I took it off the heat at 5.5 minutes!!
Here they are…
Then I sliced them in half, while they were still warm…
Now for the fun part…! I heated up my tawa… Dunked a generous helping of butter and let it melt on medium heat.
This is officially the high (and unhealthiest) point of street food. Although I have to admit I was not as generous with the butter as a REAL street vendor! Anyhow, I sliced up the pav (pronounced pao) I had leftover into half (ideally, you should use burger buns, but I had a whole packet of pao that I wanted to use!)
I placed them face down on the hot tawa with the melted butter and toasted them for about 3 minutes on each side…
While the pav was toasting, I arranged some keema-mattar (minced mutton with peas) on the plate – recipe here.
Then I placed 1 pav on the plate along with the raita (I haven’t posted on this yet, but I use it as an accompaniment to most Indian meals – beaten yoghurt, seasoned with salt, red chilli powder, ground & roated cumin and cilantro/dhaniya. Into this base you can add anything from grated cucumber to a combination of chopped onions & tomatoes to chopped boiled potatoes & mint to store bought boondi.)
I spread a teaspoon of green chutney on it (again, this is a post I’ve been putting off for a while because it has no photographic value! Essentially it’s a chutney made of cilantro/dhaniya, mint, onions, ginger, garlic, lemon juice, green chillies, salt & a dash of roasted ground cumin!)
Then I placed the 2 halves of 1 egg, face down, on the chutney-ed pav.
Sprinkled a dash of salt and ground some fresh pepper on it…
Closed it up & pressed down a little bit…
And gobbled it up!!
Who would have thought that something as mundane as boiled eggs could be so exciting!!