Vada Pav from the Tomb Raider Cookbook

Vada Pav is an Indian dish created in Mumbai and now sold as a street food across India. What it consists of is a deep-fried mashed potato dumpling inside a pav (bread bun) with two chutneys and a green chili pepper. They're also called Bombay burgers since they come from Mumbai/Bombay and look like a burger. Since many people in India don't eat beef, this is a good vegetarian option.

Lara Croft has visited India in the introduction of the original Tomb Raider and its associated remakes, Tomb Raider III, and will return there in the forthcoming Tomb Raider Catalyst. The Cookbook has two other Indian recipes, for Chicken Tikka Masala (which is more of a UK invention admittedly) and Kati Rolls.

This dish required some preparation before I could make it. You serve the Vada Pav with a red chutney, a green chutney, and a tamarind chutney. I made the red and green chutneys myself, and bought a bottle of tamarind sauce, which was the closest thing I could get.

However, I made an enormous error: I ordered the chilis through a grocery delivery service, which displayed an image of individual chili peppers on its website. I thought I was ordering single peppers, and ordered six to eight, but ended up with six to eight packages of red chili peppers and Thai green chilis. That meant I had a metric ton of them to use up in. I'll most likely make a large batch of curry paste to freeze.

First, the red chutney. You dry fry several cloves of garlic and red chilis in a pan, toast some dried coconut (I used unsweetened shredded), and blitz it into a coarse chutney in a food processor. The curvy shape of the chilis made it difficult to completely char them on all sides, and one of them burst open. At that point, I decided it was good enough and took them out, then pureed the mixture. I also made the same green chutney from the Kati Roll recipe, although with parsley because I had no cilantro and someone I was making this for dislikes that anyway.

I made the chutneys the day before I made Vada Pav at my friends' house, after we watched Spider-Man: Brand New Day (which was a masterpiece). Since they didn't have a food processor, I needed to use my own to blitz more chilis and garlic to finely chop them, and I measured the dry batter ingredients (minus water) to take with me to their place along with what else we needed. However, like an idiot, I forgot to bring my splatter guard, oil thermometer and the tamarind sauce, so we had to go without them.

To make the Vada (dumplings themselves), you first peel, boil and mash two russet potatoes, and fry off some spices in another pan. These spices include mustard seeds, the chopped chili and garlic, and curry leaves or fresh bay leaves (I opted for the latter). You're not told by the recipe to chop the leaves, but I did so after the spices were fried because I didn't want to chomp down on a big leaf. Then you stir the spices into the mash and form them into eight balls once they're cool enough to handle. Some of the mustard seeds burst and sent a few of the leaves flying.

Along with the Vada, you're asked to fry eight deseeded green chilis. I used four, which ended up being eight halves since you deseed them anyway. This is why I needed to remember my splatter guard, because they splattered when they went in. We had to quickly turn the heat down on the oil and wait for it to calm down, which thankfully didn't take too long. It probably assumes you're using larger green chilis rather than Thai green ones, which are smaller and harder to deseed.

The Vada didn't get as dark as they look in the cookbook's picture. If I'd had my thermometer I would have been able to more accurately measure the temperature and maybe they'd have got darker. Either way, they still tasted delicious. They were slightly crisp on the outside and perfectly gooey and soft in the middle with lots of warming (not too hot) spices, and the chilis weren't too spicy either without the seeds. My left thumb got more of a burn from touching them than my mouth. A combo of vegetable oil, dish soap and baking soda paste numbed the pain.

If you want to make this recipe for Vada Pav yourself, you can find it in Tomb Raider: The Official Cookbook and Travel Guide.