Before You Start
Vada pav is simple to describe and surprisingly exacting to make well. You split a soft, mildly sweet roll, the pav, and fill it with a hot potato fritter in a coat of fried besan, the vada, adding dry garlic chutney inside and a fried green chilli on the side. It started out as a cheap, filling meal for people working in the mills and on the railways of Mumbai, and today it is the city's best-known street snack, found at stalls on practically every corner. Every component is easy on its own terms; what makes the sandwich is the contrast between soft bread, hot spiced potato and fierce garlic, so none of them deserves to be rushed.
Where It Comes From
The tale usually told about vada pav is unusually specific for a street snack. Food writers tend to name Ashok Vaidya, who ran a stall outside Dadar station and is said to have started around 1966, aiming at textile mill hands and rail commuters who needed something cheap that would hold them until evening. Bread was no novelty by then, because the soft, lightly sweet pav came out of the baking habits that Portuguese settlers had left in Goa and the Bombay Presidency, and potato fritters were already a favourite on their own. Putting one inside the other made a combination that reads as local to Mumbai. Many chaats have murky or lost beginnings, whereas vada pav is generally treated as a twentieth-century city invention, although the vendor's claim rests on oral history and later newspaper pieces and no document settles it.
How to Make It
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Prep
Temper the potato and season it
Start by heating two tablespoons of oil in a small pan. Drop in the mustard seeds and wait for them to pop, then stir in curry leaves, green chilli, ginger and garlic, letting them sizzle for around a minute until the kitchen smells of them. Off the flame or on low, add hing and turmeric, then scrape everything over the mashed potato, followed by coriander and salt. Work it through evenly and taste a pinch: the potato has to be tasty before any batter goes on it.
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Assemble
Roll the potato into balls
Weigh or eyeball eight equal portions of the potato mixture and roll each between your palms into a round, a little flattened, roughly two inches across. Cracks are the enemy here, so keep working the surface until it is smooth; split spots let the batter slide off and let oil seep into the filling.
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Prep
Whisk the batter
Whisk the besan with turmeric, chilli powder, baking soda and salt, pouring in water gradually. What you want is a smooth, medium-bodied batter, thick enough to leave a continuous film on the back of a spoon rather than dripping straight away.
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Cook
Fry the vada
Take the oil to somewhere between 170 and 180°C (340 to 350°F). Roll a potato ball through the batter until it is covered everywhere, then ease it into the pan. Cook three or four vada per round, flipping them once in a while, until all sides are crisp and dark gold, which takes about five minutes. Set them on a wire rack to drain.
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Prep
Grind the dry garlic chutney
Put the garlic cloves and dried chillies in a dry pan on low heat and roast for several minutes, until the garlic softens and the chillies turn darker. Grind them briefly with the coconut (if you use it) and salt, stopping while the mix is still gritty. Keep it powdery, with no oil or water added. A little goes a long way, because the flavour is fierce.
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Assemble
Fill the pav
Cut each pav almost through, so it opens like a book. Rub a thin coat of dry garlic chutney on the inside, lay a hot vada in the crease, and press the roll lightly shut. Hand it over immediately, with a fried green chilli on the side.
Swaps That Work
Should the dried red chillies make the chutney too hot, Kashmiri chillies give a milder burn and a good colour. When pav cannot be found, soft dinner rolls or burger buns will do, but they lack the particular texture and gentle sweetness that real pav brings to the sandwich.
Turning the Heat Up or Down
Most of the sharpness comes from the dry garlic chutney, and because it is spread thinly you decide how much heat each sandwich gets: a little for mild, more for fierce. The green chilli in the potato mixture is a separate lever and can be turned up or down without touching the chutney.
Where Cooks Go Wrong
Thin batter is a frequent problem, as it runs off the potato and leaves bare spots that fry unevenly or take on extra oil. The coating should hold in a full layer. Turning the garlic chutney into a wet paste by stirring in oil or water is another; it is supposed to be coarse and dry. And putting the sandwich together too early causes trouble, because the hot vada steams the bread from inside until it is too soft to stay together. Assemble vada pav right before you eat it.
Keeping and Warming Up Leftovers
To keep: Make the potato mixture a day early if that suits you, chilling it until you are ready to roll and fry. Vada taste best on the day they are fried, though leftovers hold in the fridge for two days and can be warmed through, with a clear loss in crunch. The garlic chutney lasts two to three weeks at room temperature in a closed jar, helped by how dry it is.
To warm up: To bring leftover vada back to life, bake or air-fry them at 180°C (350°F) for six to eight minutes, and only then slip them into fresh pav. The microwave warms the inside but lets the crust go limp.
Safe Handling
When the potato is prepared in advance, chill it soon after boiling and mashing instead of letting it sit out, and finish it within a day or two. For the frying itself, keep the temperature steady, stay near a pan of hot oil, and retire the oil once it looks dark or begins to smoke sooner than fresh oil would.
Where to Read More
- Vikram Doctor, writings on Mumbai street food history, cited widely for the Ashok Vaidya/Dadar origin account of vada pav.