Indian Cuisine
What is a Balti?
It has nothing to
do with Baltimore or Baltinglass. The Balti is an Indian dish representative of a style of
cooking which some say is native to Baltistan.
It's a kind of curry,
its ingredients usually assembled and cooked quickly in a manner
reminiscent of a stir-fry. The heart of this style of cooking is a
cast-iron pot, originally also called the Balti.
The Balti evolved into a
half-hemispherical pot as likely to be made of steel as iron, and usually
called the karahi or karai.
A Balti is usually both cooked in the karahi, and served at the table in it.
Typically served
with Balti is naan
bread, a thinnish
leavened bread (somewhat like pita bread) torn up and used as an eating
implement, to scoop up the Balti and get at the
sauce. This utensil-less approach turns Balti
into one of the "sport" foods, like ribs: you get it, or it gets
you, and sometimes both. Balti in Europe started
attracting notice over the last few years in England, particularly in the
city's Sparkhill and Sparkbrook
areas, home of some of the oldest and best Balti
houses, and now increasingly known
as "the Balti Belt." Word of the
wonderfulness of Balti began to spread through the rest
of the