Build Your Own Hash Brown Chaat
Tips and tricks on how to cultivate a chaat habit at home, plus a recipe for hash brown chaat. Words by Diya Mukherjee. Photographs by Diya Mukherjee and Georgia Rudd.
Welcome to Vittles Cooking! Today, Diya Mukherjee writes about the anatomy of chaat: how anything – crisps, samosas, leftover chana masala – can be chaat, along with a recipe for hash brown chaat, a sure-shot snack staple from her kitchen.
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Anything Can be Chaat
An anatomy of chaat, plus tips and tricks on how to cultivate a chaat habit at home.
When I’m in India, I would never think to make chaat at home. I’m never more than half an hour away from a roadside chaat stall owner presiding over a hot tawa the size of a coffee table and massive pots containing chutneys and accompaniments, which they stir intermittently between serving throngs of hungry customers. A good chaat stall will always have a crowd around it – and never in a quiet, orderly queue. Despite the barrage of orders, the chaat stall owner always remains calm, deftly assembling each person’s orders, picking crunchy accoutrements from behind them to sprinkle on top according to each customer’s taste.
In Kolkata, I ate ghugni chaat every other day. In Uttar Pradesh, chaat’s spiritual home, I encountered the pioneering basket chaat in Lucknow – a cage of fried potato, which housed a separate aloo tikki: a chaat within a chaat, doused in coriander chutney, tamarind chutney, and sweetened yoghurt.
When I come home to London, though, it’s a different story. Good chaat is definitely around, but most of us won’t have it on our doorstep. And so began my quest to reverse-engineer my own chaat, the world’s most perfect snack, at home. Even though I’ll never be able to replicate the structural ingenuity of basket chaat in this lifetime, I have certainly replicated the textural wonder of good chaat in my own kitchen, with a basic formula of fried base + chutneys + as many crunchy toppings as you fancy.
One of the outcomes of my experiments is hash brown chaat, a recipe that was in regular rotation in my household during the first COVID lockdown. At first, cooking three separate elaborate meals was a welcome way of punctuating days that were otherwise largely spent in front of computer screens, but the novelty soon wore off: I recall one particularly difficult day when I insisted on making a lamb rezala and became so unpleasant to be around that my fiancé had to take a walk around the block by himself. The one thing that saved a descent into complete madness was the hash brown chaat that I had planned as a starter.
As the days went on, we felt the pull of the ease of this chaat, which could largely be made in the oven. It’s an easy thing to put together – whether as your evening meal, for your mates to eat with a few drinks, for a lazy brunch, or for a mid-afternoon solo snack if you’ve already made your chutneys – and it’s genuinely hard to mess it up.
Serving hash browns as a chaat is akin to alchemy. If you ate the best part of a packet of frozen hash browns unadorned, you would probably feel a bit ill. Eat the same volume of hash browns as a chaat, you feel light, and somehow still able to eat two servings of lamb rezala afterwards. I suppose this is the beauty of chaat: it is in no way designed to actually fill you up, but rather is simply created for the purposes of delight. Chaat isn’t really going to provide the physical sustenance to get you through a day’s hard grind, or a gruelling gym class. It exists as a dish purely to provide joy, not function. Chaat, to me, is the antithesis of a protein shake.
But why stop at hash brown chaat? Anything can become chaat if you know how – all you need is a quick trip to your nearest supermarket, and half an hour to spare. Here, in addition to the recipe for my hash brown chat, I provide an overview of the anatomy of chaat: what constitutes a good base, the key chutneys, and the toppings that provide good textural contrast – essentially an introduction to the building blocks of chaat at home to facilitate experimentation. Use this to guide a choose-your-own-adventure approach to making your own.
Anatomy of a Chaat
The Base
Beyond the Paywall: How to make hash browns, crisps and other fried goods into a quick chaat, plus a freezer-friendly recipe for green chutney, used for chaat across India.