What You Are Making
The first signs of a pav bhaji stall at night are a wide iron griddle, a cloud of steam, and the metallic clank of a masher working a heap of red vegetable mash into the surface. Butter melts in slicks around the edge. The smell of toasted spice and tomato reaches you well before you do.
The dish began as a quick lunch for Mumbai's textile mill workers in the mid-1800s, put together from whatever vegetables were on hand and stretched to feed many people fast. The logic has not changed. Everything is boiled, crushed together into one thick curry, and eaten with bread because bread is quicker than rice. Strictly speaking it is less a fixed recipe than a method: potato for body, a good handful of other vegetables for flavour, tomato and butter for richness, and a spice blend doing the heavy lifting. At home, be heavy-handed with the masher and patient with the heat. The bhaji should cook down until it is rough and spreadable, not chunky.
What separates a stall plate from an ordinary home curry is mostly technique. The vegetables are crushed hot on the same flat surface as the masala, butter goes in at intervals rather than in one lump, and a last spoon of butter and spice is stirred through just before serving so the top tastes brighter and richer than the rest.
The Dish’s Backstory
Few Indian street dishes have an origin story as well supported as this one. Historians including K.T. Achaya place pav bhaji in Mumbai's mill districts in the middle of the nineteenth century, where vendors fed workers who had no time for a seated meal with a mashed vegetable curry and bread. The pav, a soft, mildly sweet yeasted roll, points back to Portuguese influence: pão and the habit of eating leavened rolls arrived in western India through Goa and the Portuguese settlements along the Konkan coast, well before such bread was common elsewhere in the country. Pav bhaji masala sold under that name is a twentieth-century development, but the method of boiling, mashing, cooking down with tomato and butter, and serving with toasted bread was fixed on Mumbai's streets long before packaged blends existed. The dish has travelled across India and abroad, yet it is still tied most closely to Mumbai, where stalls cook it to order on enormous flat tavas.
At the Stove, Step by Step
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Prep
Roast and grind the masala
Put the coriander, cumin and fennel seeds, dried chillies, cloves, peppercorns, cinnamon and black cardamom in a dry pan over low heat. Stir for two to three minutes, until the kitchen smells of spice and the seeds look a shade darker. Let everything cool, then grind it to a fine powder together with the amchur and chilli powder. The quantity is more than one batch needs. Keep the extra in a sealed jar for up to two months, and your bhaji will taste fresher than it would from an old packet.
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Prep
Cook the vegetables very soft
Pressure cook the potatoes, cauliflower, carrot and peas with a cup of water and a pinch of salt for three to four whistles, until they collapse when pressed. They should be softer than you would ever want them for another dish, as they have to mash smooth. Pour off any extra water but keep it, because you will use it to adjust the thickness later. Crush the warm vegetables coarsely.
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Cook
Start the base in butter
Melt three tablespoons of butter in a wide pan. Add the onions and cook over medium heat for about five minutes, until soft and lightly golden. Add the ginger-garlic paste and green chillies and stir for a minute, until the raw smell goes, then add the capsicum for two minutes more.
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Cook
Cook the tomatoes all the way down
Add the tomatoes, turmeric, chilli powder and two tablespoons of the pav bhaji masala. Keep the heat at medium and press the tomatoes against the pan with the back of a spoon as they soften. When the mixture turns thick and deep red and you see oil slipping out at the edges, it is ready, usually after eight to ten minutes. Home cooks hurry this stage more than any other, and a half-cooked tomato is the main reason a bhaji tastes thin and raw.
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Cook
Fold in the mash and simmer
Add the mashed vegetables with enough of the saved water, or fresh water, to give a thick but scoopable texture, looser than mashed potato, because it will tighten as it cooks. Salt it, bring it to a gentle boil, and cook for 12 to 15 minutes. Keep pressing with the masher right in the pan now and then so the texture stays rough and does not turn to puree.
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Cook
Finish with butter and more masala
Stir in the rest of the masala and two tablespoons of butter, then simmer for three to four minutes more. Taste for salt, chilli and spice. It should be boldly spiced, a little tangy from the tomato, and rich, never watery. Take it off the heat and add the lemon juice.
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Cook
Griddle the pav
Split each roll across the middle but leave one side attached. Heat a griddle or wide pan, add a nub of butter and a pinch of the masala, and press the rolls cut-side down with a spatula until golden and crisp at the rim. Do it in batches so the pan stays hot and the butter does not scorch.
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Serve
Serve right away
Spoon the bhaji into bowls with a cube of butter melting on top, then scatter raw onion and coriander over it. Bring lemon wedges and the hot buttered pav alongside, and use the bread to scoop. Eat it at once. Once on the plate, the bhaji loses heat and texture fast.
Stand-ins If You Are Short
Beyond the usual potato, cauliflower, pea and carrot, any firm vegetable can join in. Cabbage, beetroot for colour and French beans are common, more often in homes than at stalls. A good packaged pav bhaji masala will do if you would rather not grind your own, though the flavour comes out flatter and less lively. If you cannot find pav, any soft, faintly sweet dinner roll toasted in butter is a near match, while a crusty loaf gives the wrong texture.
Dial the Chilli Up or Down
Heat enters at three points: the green chillies, the chilli powder, and the dried red chillies in the masala. For a milder bhaji, cut back or leave out the green chillies and replace part of the chilli powder with sweet paprika. For more fire, add a chopped green chilli with the last butter, since chilli added near the end keeps a cleaner, fresher sting than chilli cooked from the start.
Where It Goes Wrong
Underdone tomato is the classic fault. It leaves the bhaji sour and thin, so keep cooking until the mixture darkens and the oil separates before any vegetables go in. Another slip is boiling the vegetables in too little water and then finding yourself short of liquid to loosen the bhaji, so save the cooking water instead of draining it all away. The third is going light on butter. Pav bhaji is meant to be rich, and cutting the butter changes both the texture and the balance the dish depends on.
Leftovers, Kept and Revived
Keeping: The bhaji stays good for up to three days in a lidded box in the refrigerator. The taste often improves overnight as the spices settle. It also freezes well for a month in a closed container, and should be thawed in the refrigerator before reheating. Toasted pav does not store well once buttered and griddled, so make it fresh. Plain pav rolls last a day or two at room temperature, like any soft bread.
Reviving: Tip the bhaji into a pan, add a splash of water, and heat gently, stirring often, until steam rises from the whole surface. A small piece of butter at the end brings back some of the richness that storage takes away. In the microwave, use short bursts with stirring between, since long stretches in a shallow dish scorch the edges. Toast fresh pav for serving, because rolls that were already toasted once turn tough when heated again.
Handle This Part Carefully
Once cooked, the bhaji follows the usual rules for a vegetable curry. Get it cooled within about two hours and refrigerate it in a shallow sealed container so it chills quickly and evenly. As potatoes make up a large part of it, do not let the finished dish sit at room temperature for long, especially in warm weather, and bring it to steaming hot rather than lukewarm before serving. If the butter you toast the pav with is real dairy butter and not a shelf-stable spread, do not leave it out unrefrigerated for long periods.
Worth Opening Next
- K.T. Achaya, "Indian Food: A Historical Companion" (Oxford University Press) — on the mid-19th century origins of pav bhaji among Mumbai's mill workers.
- Lizzie Collingham, "Curry: A Tale of Cooks and Conquerors" (Oxford University Press) — on the Portuguese-Goan origins of pav bread in western India.