The Man Running a 50-Year-Old Paratha Stand on the Delhi Streets

[fire whooshing]

[egg sloshing]

[object thudding]

[tawa hissing] [horn honking]

I'm salivating right now.

It's evening in Delhi.

Hundreds of people are streaming

out of their offices hungry.

And for 40 years, [speaking in foreign language]

has been serving beautiful, hot, buttery, flakey parathas,

up to all these hungry people lining the streets.

A paratha is essentially a flatbread, a stuffed flatbread,

but the magic is in the butteries of it.

It's a meal in one, it's a snack, it's comfort food.

Let's go see what's going on.

[Meherwan speaking in foreign language]

[Ji speaking in foreign language]

[Meherwan speaking in foreign language]

Careful, this is a live operation.

Don't knock over a propane tank or we're all in trouble.

Ah, just the smell is incredible.

[Meherwan speaking in foreign language]

[Ji speaking in foreign language]

This is a three generation family business.

When he was about 10 to 12 years old,

he used to help his dad out.

Just like his son,

Happy right now is helping out in expediting.

Once his father passed away, he took over the seat

and now, he sits here in the same place that his father sat.

He's got one, two, three, four 4 bowls of stuffings.

Aloo?

[Ji speaking in foreign language]

Okay, and this way you get a little bit of all the flavors

all incorporated into it.

Lots of fresh onion,

and you can see just the mountain that's been cut back there

and piled up in the bags ready for the next order.

The cutting board is basically two by four.

That's been worked over so that you can actually see

where it's sort of got hollowed out

in the middle a little bit.

Here we go. There's the cutting board.

Somewhere there's a fence missing a post

and it'll be back here.

But the magic is in what's happening right now.

Let's see him go. Here we go, here we go, here we go.

Made into a ball, dusted in flour, hollowed out,

little stuffing the inside.

It's moving so fast, I can barely keep track

of what he's doing.

And then rolled out without tearing the dough.

40 years of practice, right? And this is how it looks.

And straight on the grill.

I mean, what's blowing my mind is that

he's putting in jagged bits of onions and potatoes stuff

that if I try to do at home,

would just tear right through the paratha.

Obviously, the technique that he's got going,

these paratha's are not tearing.

The ingredients are not poking through and bursting.

So he is grabbing a handful of dough.

Looks about just somewhere between a golf ball

and a tennis ball in size.

He's really almost massaging it in his hands

to get it super smooth.

A liberal dusting of the flower.

And then in this just really amazing sort of movement.

He's hollowing it out, stuffing it,

pinching off a little bit of the extra in the top.

You can see the part that he pinched off.

And then he's got probably the amount of pressure

that he needs to make this paratha down to an art form.

By stuffing it in the middle and then enclosing it

and pushing it down and rolling it out,

he's making sure that the stuffing spreads perfectly even,

so that all the way to the edge, the potato stuffing

fills that paratha, you know, in that thin little disc.

So this is nothing like a crepe or a pancake with toppings.

He's not making something and then just sprinkling stuff

and folding it over.

But it's essential to the nature of the paratha

is that the stuffings inside

and that it's flattened into this disc and cooked.

Ghee, clarified butter.

It's got a very high smoke point

and you can see how hot the tawa is.

Butter with scorch on this, which is why they're using ghee.

The smoke point of this is extremely high,

you're not gonna burn it.

They don't skimp on the ghee.

It's sort of partly griddling, partly frying.

I mean, think of, you know,

pancakes with butter on a flat top.

Just think of how the butter helps the pancake

just become golden and fluffy and crispy,

and yet, it's not greasy.

So he's making sure that it doesn't burn on either side.

He's cooking it perfectly. This is so hot.

Once the internal temperature gets

to the right temperature, it starts puffing.

And what he's doing by pressing is essentially helping

create the air pockets inside from one side to the other

and it'll start to pop up slowly.

From the rolling to a paratha hitting that plate,

I'm estimating about a minute 10 seconds.

[Meherwan speaking in foreign language]

[Ji speaking in foreign language]

[Meherwan speaking in foreign language]

Refuses to count.

[Ji speaking in foreign language]

He doesn't have time to count. It's just happening.

But we can estimate, we can take a guess.

We can just take a guess based on what time he starts

and what time he finishes at apart,

about a minute going out.

Look at the puff, look at the puff.

And that's what the pressing on the sides does.

Forces the air into the middle.

And that steam, that pocket on the inside is making sure

that the stuffing is perfectly cooked

and moist and delicious.

The top burners are cast iron.

I mean, he's probably cranking, whoo,

150, 200,000 BTUs per burner.

I mean, it is insane. I know I'm exaggerating a little bit.

It's the same reason why pizza cooked in a 900 degree oven.

It's got that butter nest to it that softness to the chew

'cause the dough is cooked in about 90 seconds.

So you got the dough cooked,

but while it's still retaining its pliability.

I'm so envious, so jealous of cooking

in the streets of India.

I mean, you got a propane tank in the middle of the street.

These tables look like, you know,

they're about one bump away from collapsing.

This rolling block of his made out of marble

is balanced on just some wadded up newspaper over there,

but probably at the perfect angle for him to work.

The rolling pin rests perfectly in the top.

It's about economy of motion,

it's about economy of placement.

It's about essentially everything being within arm's reach

and keeping it compact.

I often argue that our American kitchens,

professional kitchens are too big.

They're just too big.

There's too much movement back and forth.

If you could just stand in one place and rotate

and reach everything you need,

that's essentially what street cooking looks like.

You know, without worrying about regulations,

fire safety drills.

[knife scraping]

On this little phone here is streaming a live feed

from the Golden Temple in Amritsar,

one of the holiest sites for Sikhism.

This is their why. This is their purpose.

He rolled the incense by himself by hand in the morning.

But of course, the takeout ordering

is announcing right next to it.

So, you know, religion, commerce,

I mean, you can do both, right?

So let's go around this side.

What do we have in here?

[Happy speaking in foreign language]

[Meherwan] Mm-hmm.

[Happy speaking in foreign language]

It's just a nice pungent, spicy, sour tart,

acidic condiment, a pickle, to counterbalance the, you know,

the sort of ghee latent paratha, so it cuts to it.

So there you see a plate being made

and then a little bit of green chutney on the side.

I'm losing it, I got to order one

'cause if I don't, I'm just going to be starting

to s slobber all over my face.

So let me go in and place.

So one aloo paratha.

One aloo paratha.

With some right there on the side.

[Happy speaking in foreign language]

No green chutney.

Okay. Thank you.

Oh, I'm getting the special butter paratha treatment.

All right, well, this is going to be...

[paratha whooshing]

You see the difference in the smoke point

between the ghee and the butter?

The ghee immediately, the butter immediately smoked up.

I can smell the browning of the butter, but he's moving fast

and making sure that that way I don't end up

with a charred butter paratha,

but a delicious butter paratha.

All right, let's go get my paratha.

Come on over for the condiments.

And there's my raita and there's my pickle.

And just a sprinkle of that masala.

Right, the masala on top.

[audio gongs]

You can pretty much eat this any way you want.

You can eat it just by itself naked.

Or you could add a little bit of pickle to it

or you could add a little raita to it.

My favorite is the double dunk.

I'm going to make sure it gets a little pickle on one side

and make sure it gets a little of the right

on the other side.

And I'm salivating right now.

[horn honks]

[horn honking]

This is the real deal, guys. It's comfort food.

This is mac and cheese.

Whether it's butter or whether it's ghee,

the way it hits that hot tawa and smokes and browns.

It adds a nuttiness to the bread.

I mean, you can see the color of the paratha

has completely changed.

It's those milk solids in there that are caramelizing

and becoming a part of the whole experience.

So I just discovered that the Anda paratha,

the egg paratha is not what I thought it was going to be.

I just thought they'd like put an egg inside the paratha.

Like maybe an omelet or a scramble or something.

No, they cook it in a very special way.

Let's go take a look at how they do it.

All right, so mix under here, and what did you put in there?

Chili powder and salt. Salt.

Oh, he pokes a hole. Pours it in the hole. [laughing]

I love it. Yeah, I love it.

[Meherwan speaking in foreign language]

Wow. Okay.

I thought he was going to put the egg on the flat top

and then put the paratha on it,

which basically would make it

like a kathi roll type paratha.

But no, the eggs inside. Wow.

So now, just the eggs cooking in the inside

along with the pyaaz.

[cook speaking in foreign language]

[Meherwan] Just plain under.

Aloo. Aloo. Okay.

So this is a potato with the egg added

to the inside of this.

I guess he doesn't need to salt it

because probably the potatoes are already well seasoned.

There's a lot of salt going on already.

And this is the cool part, the poking of the hole.

[tawa hissing]

Perfect pour, not a drop outside the paratha.

Man, I can barely pour chai into a cup straight.

And in this case, putting two eggs in the inside

of a sleeve, a pocket, gives the idea of a hot pocket,

a whole new definition.

The last one was a single egg. I got the double leg.

What's the difference in price?

20 rupees. 20 rupees more.

Single egg for 50 rupees and double egg for 70 rupees.

Amazing. Hey, aloo paratha made by hand from scratch.

We saw every step of the process with two eggs in it.

It's 70 rupees.

That is about maybe 60 cents, 70 cents, 70 rupees,

less than a dollar.

[audio gongs] This is new to me.

It's the first time I've seen an egg cooked

inside of a paratha.

God dang, that's hot.

Whoo, oh, oh, oh, that's beautiful. That looks gorgeous.

Spiced paratha, good. Spiced potatoes, good.

Buttered paratha, good. Egg, good.

All three together, good.

Mm, mm. Fantastic.

So they say in the restaurant business,

location, location, location.

Well, this location is kind of remarkable.

We've got a main highway right behind us

where folks can see the parathas being made.

They know where the place is so they can pull off

on one of the feeder roads, park and come over here.

We associate going out with going to a restaurant, right?

That's what dining out in our minds is

and eatery, a place to eat.

But I would argue that the street itself is a restaurant.

This something, I don't know, like cozy about just

standing next to a stranger, sharing an experience,

making small talk, I see families.

I wouldn't trade this for a Michelin starred restaurant.

To me, this is the experience that I'm constantly seeking,

that I'm constantly looking for, eating on the street.