'If you must know my last meal on earth, the desert-island dish of choice that would take me instantly to my happy place, it would be pithla.'
Apart from the simplicity of preparation, no advance planning required, and easy scalability, pithla wins points for its pantry ingredients: onions, green chile peppers, Indian spices , and chickpea flour. The pithla expert in my family says that the dish is all about the chickpea flour, how you add it and how you let it cook.
My parents come from separate towns in western India, barely 90 miles apart from each other. Yet the pithla-making style in each of these towns is vastly different. This variation in the same dish is a perfect representation of the culinary diversity found throughout India.Here the chickpea flour is added to the boiling water slowly and the mixture is stirred continuously to prevent clumps—the purpose being to reduce the number of clumps, not avoid them completely.
My mother was raised in Nizamabad, a border town in the neighboring state of Telangana. Here the chickpea flour is mixed with a little bit of water to make a clump-free, loose paste before adding to the boiling water. Sometimes plain yogurt is also added to this paste to give a tangy kick. My father thinks that adding chickpea flour directly to the water results in a tastier version, and I tend to agree with him.
Pithla has sidekicks, too. If you visit a restaurant devoted to local, regional food in Mumbai, you will get pithla with, a tongue-scorching hot condiment made of roasted green chile peppers and garlic pounded into a course paste, traditionally via mortar and pestle.
All I know for certain it that pithla is comfort food, and my desert-island dish. A husband and wife cooking pithla together—the husband pouring the chickpea flour and the wife stirring continuously to avoid clumps—is the height of Maharashtrian romance according toNow every time I go to India, my father makes pithla for me. Of course, it comes with strings attached—he always needs an assistant. If I don’t want to work for my pithla, I’ll just ask my mom.See what other Food52 readers are saying.
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