JOIN USSizzling flavours on your table
The list of mouth-watering exotic culinary fare in Delhi is endless and adding another delicacy to this existing list is chaap.
The City serves a variety of chaaps like: soya chaap, malai chaap, Hariyali chaap, aachari chaap, chaap rolls and tawa chaap, to name a few. Fortunately, vegetarians need not feel left behind now.
Welcome to Chaska Chaap, a quaint little shop in Jangpura that sells more than 200 chaap sticks every day. The USP of this place is however the tawa and malai chaap that customers make a beeline for.
“I belong to a Punjabi family and chaap is a food of Punjabi origin. I have grown up eating chaap cooked by my mother. I thought why not bring this delicacy to the streets of Delhi? So three years ago I came up with this stall. Within no time, I have established a good business as I have more than 300 enthusiastic customers coming every day to eat here,” explains Love Arora, shop owner.
A chaap is essentially soaked with malai (cream), curd and other spices for hours to get the right taste. Then chaap sticks coated with mild spices are roasted in barbecue and served with onion, mint sauce and a dash of lemon. Ganesh, cook at Chaska Chaap explains, “We prepare all kinds of chaaps but what draws people here in hordes is the tawa chaap which is grilled in earthen oven and then mixed with gravy on tawa and served with rumali roti. We get maximum orders for this chaap.”
Because of a wide variety of vegetarian chaaps available at Chaska Chaap, the sales at this food stall increases by 50 per cent on Tuesdays and Thursdays as most Hindus prefer to eat only vegetarian food on these days.
The rates vary from Rs 50 to Rs 150 for a plate of chaap. The place also gets flooded after navratras to gorge on finger-licking tandoori and Afghani Chicken chaaps.
“I visit this stall with my friends almost every day and it is my favourite place to eat my evening snacks. This shop is not very old but it is the best stall serving chaap in this area. I am a vegetarian so malai and soya chaap are my favourite here,” says Balwinder Singh, a patron.
Chaaps taste best with rumali roti and if cooked longer, can also be served as a dry snack.