There is a man who has been selling chaat from the same corner near my old flat for longer than I have been alive. I ate there constantly for four years and one afternoon, having nothing else to do, I stood to one side and watched him work for about ninety minutes.
What I learned was not a recipe. It was about heat, and it changed how I cook at home more than any technique I have read about.
Nothing sat still
The first thing that struck me is that almost nothing on his cart was static. The tawa was always hot. Things moved onto it, got their treatment, and moved off within seconds or a minute.
At home I cook the opposite way. Things go into a pan and stay there while I do something else. The pan does the work slowly.
His method treats the hot surface as a tool applied briefly, rather than an environment things sit inside. The consequence is that everything retains its own character. The potato is crisp outside and soft inside because it was on high heat briefly, not medium heat for a while.
The surface was much hotter than mine
His tawa was hotter than anything I run at home, by a lot. Water flicked onto it vanished instantly rather than skittering.
The reason home cooks run cooler is fear, and the fear is justified — high heat is unforgiving and gives you a few seconds of margin instead of a few minutes.
But the trade is real. At lower heat, food releases water into the pan and then sits in it, which means steaming rather than browning. The difference between a crisp aloo tikki and a soggy one is almost entirely this.
I now preheat far longer than I used to. Most home pans are used before they are properly hot, and the first thing that goes into a not-quite-hot pan sticks and steams.
Everything was ready before anything started
Obvious in retrospect and I had never applied it.
Every component on his cart was prepared, portioned and within arm's reach. The chutneys in their bowls, the onions chopped, the sev in its tin, the potatoes boiled and cooling.
The actual assembly of a plate took maybe forty seconds. All the work had happened earlier, in bulk, in calm.
At home I chop while things are cooking, which means the pan is unattended at exactly the moments it needs attention. Switching to preparing everything first has done more for the quality of my food than any ingredient change.
He tasted constantly
Not the finished plates. The components. A finger into the chutney, a piece of potato, a pinch of the masala.
And he adjusted. The chutney got more salt at one point. The masala tin got a shake of something from another tin.
Which tells you that the recipe in his head is a target rather than a formula, and that the day's onions or tamarind or chillies are variable enough to need correcting for.
I had been treating recipes as instructions to execute rather than results to aim at, and tasting only at the end when it was too late to fix anything.
The acid at the end
The last thing on nearly every plate was something sour. Lime, or tamarind chutney, or the sour element of whatever masala he was using.
Added at the end, not cooked in. And in quantities that looked excessive to me and tasted correct.
Home cooking tends to under-acidify because the acid is added during cooking, where a lot of it cooks off, and because we are cautious about it. A squeeze of lime over a finished dish is the cheapest improvement available in most home kitchens.
What does not transfer
To be fair about the limits. He has a burner that produces more heat than a domestic hob, a tawa with enormous thermal mass, and thirty years of practice reading a surface by eye.
I cannot reproduce the first two. The third is the only one that improves with time and it improves slowly.
What does transfer is the sequence. Preheat properly. Prepare everything first. Apply heat briefly rather than continuously. Taste the parts. Finish with acid.
None of that requires equipment, and all of it made my food noticeably better within about a fortnight.
The pan he never washed
One more thing, and it made me reconsider a habit. His tawa was scraped between orders and not washed. Over years that surface had built up a seasoning that food genuinely did not stick to.
I had been scrubbing my own pans after every use, which strips exactly the layer that makes them work.
I now scrape rather than scrub anything cast iron or carbon steel, wipe it with a little oil while warm, and leave it. Within about two months a pan I had considered unusable had become the one I reach for first.
That is not a hygiene shortcut, incidentally. A pan brought to frying heat every day is not harbouring anything, and the layer is polymerised oil rather than residue.