The Indian Tidbit-Chaat!

Living in India can make you love hot, rich spices and even make you love gravies, curries and green vegetables ever more. You may even just turn a total vegetarian at the end of your Indian tour for the simple reason that there is such a huge variety of vegetarian cuisine to sample from for every palate. What's interesting is the huge popularity of street food or chaat in North India.

Chaat tingles the taste buds of every local Indian in the heartland of Uttar Pradesh. Extremely hot and spicy, chaat includes an assortment of goodies- Gol Gappas, Tikkis, Dahi Bhalla, Stuffed Tomato, Mixed Chaat and more. It shows how much people here love the use of red chillies, red hot pepper and make it into a mixed concoction and gobble it up much as an Englishman would guzzle down a beer on a sunny weekend or an American would love to experiment with cocktails!

Gol Gappas are round hollow dough balls filled up with spicy-sour water and eaten so that it melts in your mouth. Tikkis are deep fried flattened balls of boiled and mashed potatoes which are prepared by putting spoons of yogurt and sweet tamarind sauce sprinkled with some red chilli powder, salt and ground cumin seeds. Dahi Bhallas is nothing but a traditional preparation out of lentils and pulses that have been ground and made into a paste and then deep fried and made into wedges or cutlets. These are mashed and dolloped with yogurt and peppered with ground cumin seeds, salt and red chilli powder. Stuffed Tomato, needless to say, is stuffed with boiled and mashed potatoes savored with green chillies, coriander leaves and hot and spicy powder or Garam Masala. Finally Mixed Chaat has a mixture of lentil balls, cutlets, wedges, tikkis, gol gappas and pappadums in a plate of yogurt and spices.

It's lovely to watch people crowd around a single man or two at most working at a huge round frying pan to feed five or even ten persons standing around a small food stall. This is a common sight in most cities of Uttar Pradesh.