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You've given me the smallest white bread you can find. I love it. This is a bit of a challenge now. You have Do you have anything larger than this? Great to be back on School of Walk. My name is Karan Gokani. I've got restaurants called Hoppers which are better known for South Indian and Sri Lankan food. But what most people don't know is I'm from Mumbai and I grew up eating food all over the country. I cook and so record and share a lot of those recipes on my personal channel current cooks. I've also got two cookbooks. One is more of the hoppers recipes. So more Sri Lankan, South Indian and that's
called Hoppers the cookbook. And then more recently there was a cookbook called Indian 101 which I wrote in which basically covers my favorite food growing up from India. It's a bit of a starter course into Indian food but without claiming to be a big masterass. That brings me to what are we cooking today? We're going to do a very simple Bombay style toasty. So I call it the Bombay cheese toast. It's something we grew up eating all the time in India. Let's start with I'd say the most important component of this dish, the green chutney. So green chutney is effectively like a little like a pesto of sorts made with a bunch of fresh herbs. You want to keep them as fresh as
possible and the ratios just depend on your mood, on your liking. A little bit of cumin in there. Toast the cumin nicely. And then in the meantime, coriander. Nice fresh coriander. We've kept it in chilled water just to keep it fresh. Keep it cold cuz when it goes in, it's going to get heated up a little bit. And the hotter it gets, the darker it tends to get. So often people are like, "How do how are those chutneys in restaurants so beautifully bright and vibrant." And that's probably because, you know, they haven't heated up too much or they've got really nice sort of professional grade blenders that don't heat up as much. Freestyle to your liking. And if you don't have something
you can substitute if you enjoy adding other herbs in dill works really well in chutney um you can add more green chili if you prefer. I take the stalks off these um mint leaves because I think they go quite bitter when ground up. Whereas with the coriander you can go in with the stalks and all. Mint's also great because it gives you that lovely freshness but it can be overpowering if it's just mint. So, it's nice to balance it out with a little bit of that coriander. So, just a light toast on the cumin seeds. You could go in raw, but I like a little bit of a the toasty sort of aromomas in the background. So, that's done. I've got the cumin seeds there. They just go on top. So, we've
got that in. I'm going to get green chili. Now, I love green chili and I'm going to make it nice and spicy. So, I'm going in with a couple. And then little piece of ginger. Again, this is a really essential ingredient. Really nice and, you know, it's bright, it's fresh, and there's nothing quite like fresh ginger in this chutney. Some people add garlic as well. You can add a clove of garlic, but then not everyone likes it, so I'm going to leave it out there. If the skin's not too old and not too thick, there's no harm just leaving it in there. Um, again, less food waste.
It's just easier, quicker. So, a little bit of lime in there just to sharpen it up. The balance is really important of getting lime, sugar, salt and that spice right and then a little bit of chart masala which is this lovely savory background. This is not something everyone does effectively. Chart masala is a load of cumin, chilies and green mango which gives it that lovely tartness. And then for me one of the real standouts is that green mango with um black salt or the kalanamak as we call it which has a sulfuric undertone to it but really essential in a lot of Indian street food. So I've got that in. Like I said you could have garlic in there, you could have chilies in there. Some people put tomatoes in there. You could finish with some
yogurt. I'm going to keep it quite simple. A little splash of water to help it blend. You don't want it to get too thin. Now here's a trick that always works a charm. a couple of cubes of ice. They'll dilute the chutney, but at the same time, they'll keep it cold. And keeping it cold is also the secret to keeping it really beautifully bright and vibrant green. That's that lovely texture that I like. A really fine bright green chutney. Just going to try it. Little more sugar. pinch of salt. If you were serving this with kebabs or with samosas or just as a little dip, yogurt is great. But because we're going to be cooking this, I'm going to leave
it as is. You could save the rest and mix it with some yogurt. Even great to dip papa in there or crisps or chips or things like that. So, one quick blend just to mix that through. So, there we have it. Lovely chutney, perfect with so many things. So that itself is a nice recipe, but we'll give you a second one as well. And this one, like the one we did last week, is carbon carb, no fail, something we eat all the time. So we'll make a lovely Bombay sandwich. So white bread, I think, you know, bread was still sliced bread was still one of those western luxuries and especially white because there's a big movement towards, oh, you got to eat whole meal bread. At least in my home, white bread, there's something nice and
comforting if you eat it every now and then uh as opposed to making it a big part of your diet. Now it's about building and again think about this entrepreneurial spirit of India where guys on the street want to build his little stall. It started off with a plain cheese and chutney sandwich then he added a few vegetables to it as you had different vegetables come in from you know different parts of the world and then getting sexier. I've been back to Bombay recently and I found guys who were doing these cheese toasts doing avocado toast. It's a sign of how adventurous people have gotten. It's also a sign of, you know, how these guys adapt so well to what's the trend. But today, we're doing um a very traditional
one. So, some tomatoes. Peppers are nice. Peppers are really nice. Again, it's the kind of stuff that we grew up having in our sandwiches. Not essential. You want to cut them nice and thin because they're not really going to cook once they're inside the bread. You don't want to have that really raw pepper. Just a few thin onion rings if you like them. I love red onions in the sandwich. So once you've done that, you want to use cheese. Now in India, we use Amul cheese. Amul butter, which is really this sort of nostalgic Indian salty butter and cheese you get there. But good quality mature cheddar works really well. Just slice it up a little bit or crumble it, grate it.
You've got all the different ingredients you want. And then it's a bit like a pizza party where people just come over and decide what they want to get into theirs. You could have a little toasty press. And then finally, another really important ingredient, potatoes. So, we're going to thinly slice this boiled potato up. And it's just it's magic. Like you It's probably not one of those things you think of sticking into a sandwich, but just that potato in bread. um kind of two different carbs working together. So what I'm going to do with the potato, I've sliced it up and sprinkle it with a little chart masala just to season because I boiled it in plain water. So we've got our prep here. Uh most important ingredient,
the chutney, some cheese, really nice salted butter, and then we want to go fairly heavy on this. So this is the inside of the sandwich. You can leave the edges on, but I just find that again it's more nostalgic thing. They always trim the edges off. Got the chutney. So, a nice layer of chutney on top. You want a good amount because that's going to give you loads of flavor. It's going to get into the bread as well. And that butter kind of stops it from getting too deep into the bread. Spuds. Onions. Nice. A bit of pepper. So once you've done that, nice sprinkling of chart masala because that's seasoning your veg. Really nice flavors in there. Can never have enough of chart masala. And then finally, just go fairly generous with the cheese.
You could go top and bottom with the cheese as well, just depending on your affinity and love of cheese. Very often I do that. I've got them after chutney, I go cheese, and then it kind of melts up and down and then gets locked in. You got a little more butter. This is more important than the butter inside. This is what's going to give it that lovely flavor on top. I mean, I'll do yours later. So, I've got butter at the bottom, butter on top. We're going to balance that nicely up there. That's heated up as well. I did this sandwich once for Fortn Masons. They had a sandwich making competition. I won't tell you who else took part. Um, but yeah, the English think they have a good sandwich. I think this really was the winner that day,
even though it might not have won. But I do think it's just such an incredible sandwich. And it's also such a great story of ingenuity, of adventure, and of this real sort of making the most of what you have and making it cool. So, it's these guys who sort of never grew up eating bread. um understanding that okay fine there's a demand for a sandwich and then going ahead and making something that's really their own to a point where today that Bombay sandwich is a thing of its own where it's not just like okay fine we've copied something added one ingredient in but they've literally built it from scratch apart from the bread you won't see most of these ingredients in a sandwich and I love that I love that about this dish and I think it's
just that's why there's so much more to it than it just being a simple sandwich plus you know when you make it you get to make this which is this magical condiment that works wonders in Indian kitchens. I can see that chutney dripping down the cheese melted. It's lovely. Look at that. Look at all that. It's beautiful. That goes down there. Obviously, there's a joy about those the lovely camping toasty makers that seal the edges and when you cut through, kind of oozes out, but there's just something you could do with two pans in your house, uh even if you didn't have a toasty maker, and that's what we wanted to show you. So, we've got that. Now, you can eat it just like that, and it's
fantastic, but we want to be indulgent. So, going to get some more fresh chutney on top. Spread it on. If you want, you can get some more butter on top as well. And then these little crisps. It's a third carb. So you've got graham flour crisps. Uh or you could get potato versions of these. These potato save we call them which is a really nice sort of street food snack. Very tasty in and of itself. And I first had it like this because there's a guy down the road from where I live in Mumbai who does it exactly like this. It's just a little more indulgent. This looks really nice. And that's it. That's your lovely tasty Bombay sandwich. And because I'm at the school of walk, I had to use one of these. I loved it. Might
nick this. There you go. That, my friends, is incredible. I've loved being out here and sharing these recipes with you at the School of Walk. Uh, if you enjoyed it, you'll find loads more in my books. Um, come and eat with us at Hoppers. very different food and you can get direct access and see stuff that I'm up to at current cooks my Instagram channel and obviously this is where it's all at school of walk like comment subscribe I'd love to know what you think about this your memories of Bombay sandwiches if you've been to Bombay before or what you like to stick into your sandwich
