Mumbai food special :

At any time of the day, there’s always a crowd outside Parle Tilak Vidyalaya MG Road, Vile Parle East. On a Tuesday afternoon, the enthusiastic cries of students running around the playground rings in my ears. The smell of curry leaves, which wafts from a corner on the campus, where 75-year-old Babu Satap Rao has been running his canteen since 1950, is intoxicating. He also caters to outsiders who throng his stall for Patti Samosas, Vada Pav, Kanda Bhajji and Kothimbir Vadi.

A worker at Babu Vada Pav at Vile Parle rolls the vada. Every three days, they utilise 600 kg of potatoes. Pics/Khushnum Bhandari

I have signed up for a Vada Pav Food Walk with experiential company, Blue Bulb and this is the ideal place to start. Food blogger Abhishek Sadekar, a resident of Vile Parle East, tells me about the history of vada pav, how it evolved into Mumbai’s favourite snack and the various iconic joints that serve it.

Get your hands dirty

We step into the dimly-lit kitchen, where I will get to make my own vada pavs. On my left, a worker is deep-frying vadas in a huge pan while on my right, another man is mixing thencha — a mixture of ginger, curry leaves, green chillies, coriander, salt, turmeric and black gram flour and mustard seeds in oil — into a big container of mashed potato.

Having gorged on various vada pavs across Mumbai and Maharashtra, this is the first time I have entered a kitchen. While the workers prepare the ingredients, Sadekar takes me through a brief history of the vada pav, which was first served at a joint in Dadar in 1970. “While the batata vada, which is mixed with turmeric, salt, ginger- chilli paste, is typically a Maharashtrian delicacy, the pav has been borrowed from the Christians,” says Sadekar, handing over a pair of gloves to me.

I slip them on and settle on a blue plastic stool across a low wooden bench. One of the workers scoops a handful of aloo masala and rolls it into a ball using just one hand. He skillfully rotates the ball in his palm and shapes it into a perfect round. When it’s my turn, I can barely roll it using just one hand and take the leeway to use both. Thankfully, my vadas are almost perfect. He then shows me how to flatten each of them before they are ready to be fried.

The oil is bubbling hot in the pan and another worker shows me how to mix the hand-rolled aloo vadas in the chrome yellow besan batter and gently slide them into the oil. I dunk one into the sticky paste and slip it into the oil.

Next, Sadekar guides me to the stall outside to assemble my vada pavs. The fresh pav, I am told, comes from a bakery in Andheri five times a day. When I ask the owner how many vada pavs do they sell in a day, he says he stopped counting years ago, though they replenish their 600-kg potato sacks every three days.

As the impatient buyers waiting at the stall for their order look on, I spread a generous layer of mint chutney on the pav, top it with sweet date and tamarind chutney and sprinkle dried garlic powder and pack in the vada.

The pungent taste of curry leaves, intermingled with garlic, ginger, coriander hits my mouth as I bite into the vada pav I prepared. “The green chutney usually activates your lower palate — the tongue — while the red chutney works on the upper palate,” Sadekar explains, who shares with me the secret behind the dried garlic powder. “It’s nothing but the small crispies that are found in the frying pan. They are crushed and mixed with salt, garlic and red chilli powder,” he says.

Babu bhai, who opened the canteen in 1950 after working as a table boy and helper in the nearby Jeevan restaurant, eagerly hands us a plate of patti samosas, his next best item. The filling comprising green pea, garam masala and red chillies, is wrapped in thin pastry sheets. Having eaten the Punjabi samosas often, this taste is rather unique, thanks to its paper-thin crust and fiery filling.