Nope, what you see in the picture above is not the panta bhaat of Kishwar Chowdhury in MasterChef Australia 2021 fame. This is the phyana bhaat of Bengal. Both a comfort food and a quick solution to food pangs. Ever dependable, no matter where life takes you.
I’ve grown up on it and it was a fallback option for my parents when they lived abroad. Some readers told me that they had this before going to school everyday.
Rice had with the phyaan/ starch it’s cooked in. With alu sheddo/ mashed potatoes and veggies of the day. Boiled egg is a must. Many will tell you that no Bengali worth his salt would use basmati. Short grained rice. Ideally gobindo bhog is what they would recommend. I’d counter by saying that a Bengali mom would make do with whatever is at home. We had basmati, surti kolam, red rice and arborio. Plus the rice was meant to be had as steamed rice at night and making two rounds would be rather self indulgent but then you should expect to face outrage when you write about anything Bengali.
Green chilli is a must traditionalists will say. Well, I have a stomach bug so that would have worked as a prop at the most today.
When people tell me ‘it should be this way,’ I say, ‘could,’ yes. But there’s no ‘should’ in the kitchen.
We take our food seriously and are willing to march to BBD Bagh for it.
Ghee was added to the rice today. Mustard oil to the mash. Ideally the alu should have had raw onions and chillies but stomach bug remember? This mash is the same as the pitika of Assam, chokha of Bihar and bhorta of Odisha and Bangladesh. The fat component would be butter instead when I was a fussy bilet ferot/ foreign returned kid.
Salt anchors the flavour. Pepper helps. The dish is AKA alu bhaate.
I got our cook to make it today. Here’s what I told Banu:
Chaawal banao aur thora paani rakh do jaise pasta me karte ho. I then put the two back together, after keeping some rice aside for the night, and boiled this for a bit more time. I also asked her to make the alu stuffing she does for parathas. ‘Mash,’ she asked in English after I played dumb charades with her. I asked her to add mustard oil and salt. I rolled it into a ball with my palms at the end for the finishing touch.
Tasted good. I should have this more often, as I told the boys later.
I had written about phyana bhaata in more detail earlier here. I had used gobindo bhog then!
lovely 🙂 made me question my mangsho bhaat plans for tomorrow, this will definitely be had once before monday. there should never be a 'should' in kitchen, this is going to stay.