Overview
Pav bhaji started in the 1850s and 1860s as a quick lunch for Mumbai's textile mill workers, assembled from available vegetables and designed to feed many people fast. The logic has not changed. Everything is boiled, mashed into one thick curry, and scooped up with bread, which is quicker to eat than rice. The bhaji is best understood as a method and not a fixed list. Potato gives body, a good pile of other vegetables adds flavour, tomato and butter add richness, and a spoonful of masala does most of the seasoning. At home the dish needs a firm hand with the masher and some patience, because the mixture should reduce to a rough, spreadable thickness and not stay chunky.
The taste of a street stall, as opposed to a home curry, comes mostly from technique. First, the vegetables are mashed fine and hot on the same flat griddle where the masala cooks. Second, butter goes in at several stages, not all at once. Third, a last sizzle of butter and masala is stirred through just before serving, so the top of the dish tastes sharper and richer than the rest.
Where the Dish Comes From
The history of pav bhaji is better recorded than most street foods. Food historians, K.T. Achaya among them, place it in Mumbai's mill districts in the mid-nineteenth century, where vendors sold workers a fast, filling lunch of mashed vegetable curry and bread. The pav, a soft, mildly sweet yeasted roll, reflects Portuguese influence. Leavened rolls and the word pão reached western Indian cooking through Goa and Portuguese settlements along the Konkan coast, long before the bread became common elsewhere in India. Pav bhaji masala as a named packaged blend dates to the twentieth century, but the method, which is to boil, mash, cook down with tomato and butter and serve with toasted bread, was fixed on Mumbai's streets long before packets existed. The dish has spread across India and abroad, yet it remains most closely tied to Mumbai, where specialist stalls still cook it to order on large flat tavas.
Step-by-Step Method
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Prep
Roast and grind the masala
Every whole spice in the blend (coriander, cumin, fennel, dried red chillies, cloves, peppercorns, cinnamon, black cardamom) goes into a dry pan on low heat for 2 to 3 minutes, long enough for the kitchen to smell of them and for the colour to deepen slightly. Once cold, the lot is milled to a fine powder with the amchur and chilli powder. Because the yield is larger than one pot of bhaji requires, the surplus is jarred airtight, where it stays good for two months and tastes livelier than a packet blend that has sat on a shelf.
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Prep
Cook the vegetables until very soft
Potato, cauliflower, carrot and peas share a pressure cooker with one cup of water and a pinch of salt for 3 to 4 whistles. The target is a softness well beyond what other dishes call for, because the pieces have to collapse under the masher. Any water left in the cooker is strained off into a bowl and saved for thinning the bhaji later. While the vegetables are still warm, they are crushed into a coarse mash.
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Cook
Start with the onion base
Three tablespoons of butter melt in a wide pan. The onions cook over medium heat for about 5 minutes, until soft and lightly golden. Ginger-garlic paste and green chillies follow and cook for a minute, until the raw smell is gone, and then the capsicum goes in for two more minutes.
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Cook
Reduce the tomatoes completely
Chopped tomatoes, turmeric, chilli powder and 2 tablespoons of the masala are added. They cook over medium heat, with the tomatoes pressed against the pan as they soften, until the mixture is thick and deep red and oil appears at the edges. This takes 8 to 10 minutes and is the stage home cooks most often shorten. Under-cooked tomato is the main reason a homemade bhaji tastes thin and raw and not rounded.
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Cook
Combine with the mash and simmer
The mashed vegetables go in with enough of the saved liquid, or fresh water, to give a thick scoopable texture, looser than mashed potato and closer to a thin curry, since it tightens further with cooking. Salt is added and the pan is simmered for 12 to 15 minutes, with a potato masher used now and then right in the pan so the texture remains rough and not puréed.
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Cook
Finish with masala and butter
The remaining masala and 2 tablespoons of butter are stirred in, and the pan simmers for a final 3 to 4 minutes. Salt, chilli and masala are adjusted by taste: the bhaji should be firmly spiced, faintly tangy from tomato, and rich and not watery. Lemon juice is added off the heat.
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Cook
Griddle the pav
Each roll is split horizontally but left joined at one edge. A griddle or wide pan is heated, a knob of butter and a pinch of masala are added, and the pav goes cut-side down until golden and slightly crisp at the edges, pressed gently with a spatula. Batches keep the pan hot and stop the butter from burning.
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Serve
Plate hot
The bhaji is served in a bowl with a cube of butter melting on top, raw chopped onion and coriander scattered over, and lemon wedges and hot buttered pav alongside. The pav is used to scoop up the bhaji. The dish is eaten right away, since neither its texture nor its temperature holds well once it is on the plate.
Ingredient Swaps
Any firm vegetable can join the classic potato, cauliflower, pea and carrot base. Cabbage, beetroot for colour, and French beans are common regional additions, more often in home cooking than at stalls. A good store-bought pav bhaji masala is acceptable if grinding is not practical, although the flavour is flatter and less fresh. Where pav is not available, any soft, faintly sweet dinner roll toasted in butter comes close, while crusty bread does not give the right texture.
Turning the Heat Up or Down
Three ingredients carry the pungency: fresh green chillies, the chilli powder, and the dried chillies that are ground into the masala. Each can be dialled separately. To soften the dish, the fresh chillies are cut back or dropped and some of the powder is swapped for mild paprika. To sharpen it, a freshly chopped green chilli is stirred in during the final butter addition, since raw chilli added late gives a brighter bite than chilli cooked from the start.
Frequent Errors
First, under-cooked tomatoes leave the bhaji sour and thin, so the tomato and masala base must visibly darken and release oil before the vegetables are added. Second, boiling the vegetables in too little water leaves no liquid for loosening the bhaji later, so the cooking water should be kept and not drained away completely. Third, reducing the butter is a mistake in a dish built to be rich, because it changes both texture and the balance of flavour.
Keeping and Warming Leftovers
To keep: Refrigerated in a lidded container, the bhaji is good for 3 days, and many cooks find the taste rounder on day two. Freezing is also possible for about a month, in a tightly sealed tub, with an overnight thaw in the refrigerator. The pav is a different matter: once buttered and griddled it declines fast, whereas plain rolls last a day or two on the counter, as with soft bread in general.
To warm: A pan over medium-low heat, with a few spoonfuls of water to loosen the mash and regular stirring, brings the bhaji back to a full simmer. A small piece of butter folded in at the end puts back the richness that chilling takes away. Where a microwave is used, short bursts with a stir in between avoid the scorched rim that a long run produces in a shallow dish. Pav is toasted fresh for each serving, because a roll that has already been griddled once turns tough on a second pass.
Safe Handling
The bhaji is fully cooked and is handled like any cooked vegetable curry: it is cooled within about two hours of cooking, not left out, and refrigerated in a shallow sealed container so that it cools quickly and evenly. Potatoes form a large part of it, so the finished dish should not sit at room temperature for long, especially in warm weather, and it is reheated until steaming hot and not just lukewarm. Dairy butter used for toasting pav should not stay unrefrigerated for long periods, unlike a shelf-stable spread.
References
- 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.