Bikaner, Rajasthan, India (CNN) — Indian poet Ashok Vajpeyi called Bikaner “a city where one half of the population is occupied with making bhujia and the other half eating it.”
Anyone visiting this far-flung destination in northwest India’s frontier state of Rajasthan might agree. The golden and crispy fried snack, shaped like noodles, is served everywhere from tiny roadside tea stalls to high-end cocktail bars.
It finds its way onto every course — as toppings on breakfast and on lunch and dinner time curries. Why? Because it’s delicious — made with a local bean known as moth or gram flour seasoned with traditional spices. Another popular variant, aloo bhajia, is made with potatoes.
Bikaner isn’t lacking in flavor itself. A place of shifting dunes, camels and ancient forts built by warrior kings, just 150 kilometers (93 miles) from the Pakistan border, it’s a quintessential desert landscape.
Locals refer to themselves as being saral, sukh, and sust (simple, happy, lazy). Simple and happy, perhaps, but the bhujia makers here are far from lazy — they start work at 4 a.m. most days in order to collectively produce more than 250 tons before clocking off.
Some bhujia makers have experimented with flavors like barbecue and wasabi.
Gyanpratim/Adobe Stock
A delicious history
It’s an obsession nearly 150 years in the making.
The story goes that in 1877, Bikaner state monarch Maharaja Shri Dungar Singh commissioned a novel savory item to treat guests at his palace — and the royal chefs came up with bhujia.
Little did Singh know that what emerged from his kitchen would become an edible Indian national treasure.
News of bhujia spread fast and soon it was being made in homes around the state. In 1946, one enterprising local, Ganga Bishan Agarwal, began selling the snack from a humble shop in a Bikaner backstreet.
A decade later, Agarwal left town to create his own sweet empire, which proved so successful that several curious businessmen from farther afield were prompted to trace his origins and discovered the magic of bhujia.
This gate once marked the entrance to the old city of Bikaner.
Stefano Barzellotti/iStock Editorial/Getty Images
Today most bhujia-producing businesses have their roots back in Bikaner. But that does not mean that you can set up a wok and churn out bhujia anywhere and call it ”Bikaneri.”
For many fans, only bhujia made in Bikaner counts as the “real thing.”
In 2010, the Bikaneri bhujia was issued a coveted Geographical Indication tag by the…
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