G8 Punjab / The Kitchen

Wheat and Dairy: The Two Pillars of a Punjabi Kitchen

Understand the crop and the buffalo, and most of what appears on a Punjabi table stops being mysterious.

Punjabi cooking is built on wheat rather than rice, which sets it apart from much of the subcontinent and explains the central importance of the flatbread. Roti, the everyday unleavened bread, is made from wholemeal flour and water, kneaded to a soft dough, rested, rolled thin and cooked dry on a flat iron pan called a tawa before being finished briefly over direct heat so it puffs. It is made fresh, meal by meal, in quantities matched to the number of people at the table. Bread that has been sitting is not really the point.

The second pillar is dairy, and specifically the buffalo, whose milk is richer than cow milk and yields more fat. From it come the things a Punjabi kitchen treats as staples rather than luxuries: yoghurt set overnight, the thin salted or sweet buttermilk drink called lassi, fresh butter, and ghee, which is butter simmered until the water cooks off and the milk solids toast, giving a clarified fat with a nutty smell and a long shelf life. Paneer, a fresh unaged cheese made by curdling milk and pressing the curds, belongs to the same family.

Put those two together and the logic of a meal becomes obvious. A cooked vegetable or lentil dish provides savour and protein, bread provides bulk and is also the cutlery, yoghurt provides coolness and a counterweight to spice, and a raw onion or a pickle provides sharpness. Nothing on the table is decorative. It is a structure designed by people doing physical work in a hot climate, and it holds up remarkably well in a Melbourne winter as well.