Pav Bhaji (Mumbai Mashed Vegetable Curry with Buttered Rolls)

Variations

• Cheese pav bhaji. The commonest variation in Mumbai: a heap of grated cheese over the top at the end. Jain, kadai and paneer versions sit on the same stall boards.
• Less butter. The stall flavour is largely the butter, and halving it makes a different dish. If you do cut it, add more lemon to keep the balance.
• Making the masala yourself. Pav bhaji masala is garam masala plus amchur (dried mango powder), asafoetida and extra black pepper. The sourness built into the blend is the distinctive part, so a substitute without amchur tastes flat.
• The vegetables. Only potato, tomato and onion are fixed; the rest is whatever is around. It began as a mill workers' lunch, so that is close to the original.
• About the photograph. The hero is the finished plate. The griddle shots show this page's technique far better, but they are a griddle surface with no plate and no bowl, and do not read as a dish.

Tips

• This dish does the thing the site twice tells you not to. Samosa says "cool the filling; crush the potato by hand — a masher bursts the starch into glue", and Mashed Potato says "don't overmix — working the starch too much makes it pasty". Both are right — and bhaji is the dish that wants that glue. The body that mounds on a spoon and spreads on bread is exactly that burst starch. Which is why the potato goes in hot and why you use a masher.
• Pressing is how it reduces. Water trapped inside a vegetable does not leave until there is surface for it to leave from. Every press puts a new face against a hot plate, so the movement that makes it finer is the same movement that drives the water off. That is why the same recipe stays watery in a narrow deep pot however hard you mash.
• Press, do not stir. Stirring only mixes; pressing crushes and puts the crushed thing against the metal at the same time. It is the same hand movement as Cassoulet, which also presses instead of stirring — for the exactly opposite reason. There you press so the beans do not break; here you press to break them.
• It is the exception to Knife Skills. That guide says uniform size is a cooking decision rather than a cosmetic one — but that is about dishes where the pieces still exist at the end. Here everything is crushed, so what has to match is not size but boiling time. The one thing to chop fine is the onion, which does keep its shape all the way through.
• Do not blend it. A blender gives you a smooth soup and it stops being bhaji. Whole peas and recognisable bits of cauliflower are the marker.
• Season the bread too. Toasting the pav in plain butter and toasting it in butter with a spoonful of bhaji smeared into it are different things. The stalls do the second, and it makes the bread part of the dish rather than something served with it.
• Not the same as Dal. There the pulse falls apart into its own thickener and hot fat is poured over at the end. Here the body is potato starch, and the butter is not poured over — it is in from the start.