HYDERABAD: Recently I was vacationing at a homestay in a small hamlet called Tumling in Eastern Nepal, located at an altitude of 10,000 feet. When I checked what they were offering for dinner, the answer from the lady running the kitchen was khichdi with potato fritters and pickles. We had a few trekkers and travelers from all over the country, and later in the night, I could notice everyone’s contented look after a satisfying dinner of the warm comfort food.
Khichdi is a dish for all weathers, all seasons and all occasions. This dish is part of the cuisines of many regions in India, from Gujarat to Bengal, and from Punjab to Telangana. While khichdi is an easy-to-cook dish using rice and lentils, variations using other ingredients like sabudana or millets are also becoming popular among the health conscious. The dal used also varies from place to place and so do the spices.
Within a cuisine the recipe changes based on the occasion, for example in Bengal, where it is called khichudi, the version when prepared for a patient will be completely different from the variant which is cooked for offering to the deity.
In Hyderabad, khichdi is mainly a breakfast dish which is savoured with kheema and a tangy chutney called khatta. Recently there was a move to declare this dish as the national dish of India.
There is no single recipe to prepare khichdi, in fact, the number of variations across the country should be in hundreds. It is said that the dish has served as an inspiration behind the British dish “kedgeree”, and the recipe travelled from India through the British officers returning from a posting in India. In Hyderabad, various regional versions of the dish are available in different restaurants. For example, the khichdi with kheema and khatta are available in quite a few local restaurants. The Bengali version is available on special occasions at Sarkar’s Kitchen whereas for the Marathi version you need to visit Marathi Katta on Wednesdays. However, there are now places which specialize in this dish itself and prepare different versions.
Khichadiwala at a drive-in food court in Madhapur is a place which specializes only in this humble dish. This is the Hyderabad outlet of a Nagpur based chain which is also present in Pune and Bangalore. The place serves around 30 different types of khichdi. The usual comfort versions are Mixed Vegetable Khichdi and Moong Dal Khichdi, while specials include a sabudana version served with fried potatoes, as well as a lemon garlic preparation. The outlet serves the dish with a special garlic tadka which can be enjoyed as an add-on. To add some twist to the traditional dish, there are some innovative creations like Italian Khichdi, Tomatina Khichdi and a version with spicy Saoji masala.
Within a couple of months of starting operations, the place already serves more than a hundred plates every day, with a steady demand coming from the home delivery segment too. While the modern versions of the dish is slowly getting accepted, most of the sales are still for the traditional preparations. The Great Khichdi Experiment is a private label under Foodpanda serving many types of khichdis from a cloud kitchen. Langarwali Sal Khichdi, Methi Khichdi, and Dal Palak Khichdi are some of the variants they deliver online.
(Sabyasachi is a food enthusiast and blogs at www.foodaholix.in)