When you think about India, the first things you think about are: cows, spices and maharajas (maybe not in this order)… And what about food?
What’s Thali?
Indian cuisine is really tasty and rich. Every dish – even the ones that seem easy to make – is made with many ingredients and hides the incredible skills of the cook who prepares it.
In this post we want to talk about the dish that sums up all the different souls of Rajasthan (India).
We tasted so many dishes more or less spicy but always damnly tasty..
But our experience in Rajasthan could be summed up in the THALI
It’s a unique dish made of rice, papadum, chapati, dahl, vegetables, and a sweet (You can find it for less than 2 euros and one of them is enough for 2 people- it’s easy to find it in local restaurants).
In this dish we found INDIA…
Rice beans represent the large number of people that live in India
The crunchy papadum represents the hard “peel” that is not easy to overcome when you arrive. Noise, smell, pollution, heat…
Homemade chapati are made of water and flour. They are easy and genuine but essential with every meal (they are the Indian “cutlery”) and they remind us religion and its rites, so important in every moment of Indian life.
Creamy dahl seems delicate but it has a strong and spicy taste. It’s like people we met: kind and smiling but curious and sometimes they try to fool you!
The sweet part (strongly sweet!) is the taste that India leaves in your mouth. After a trip to India you can’t help but fall in love with its colours, its perfect monuments and its mystic temples.
Thali for us is the dish that perfectly represents our experience in Rajasthan.
But Indian cuisine is so rich and various that it’s almost impossible to sum it up in a blog!!
What about your experience? Which dish represents India perfectly? Do you think that every place in the World could be represented by one dish?