Week 12: Street Foods - New York Style Kati Wraps [Cooking]

Intro from Cooking Challenge: Street food is a very broad topic, but to try to sum it up succinctly, it’s food sold by a vendor at a location that isn't a restaurant (i.e. food cart, market, fair) which is usually cheap and easy to eat on the go. Generally you’ll find regional favorites and comfort food – no haute cuisine here. In the past few years, food trucks have become very much in vogue, and the variety of options has absolutely exploded. You can find amazing crepe carts, a truck cooking pizzas in a wood oven, Thai-Mexican fusion, and Brazilian BBQ, plus New York style Halal carts on damn near every corner. If it can be made portable and on the cheap, someone somewhere in this country is probably making it in a truck. Most countries have their own street food traditions, so if there are any styles of cuisine you have been looking to cook but haven’t had the chance to, this is the week for you. If you’re looking for inspiration, check out this overview of street food from around the world.

Kati wraps/rolls are one of my favorite street foods in NYC.  I wager they're better than the typically more popular chicken-over-rice (as delicious as it is).  Everything was made from scratch, which was definitely a labor of love.

I got the recipe for the parathas (the wraps) from here - they ended up being super fun to make, although the excruciatingly small, yet vague, step-by-step directions were a bit difficult to follow at times.

I adapted the recipe for the chicken from here.  I think the recipe was missing some steps (for instance, it calls for three tomatoes in the ingredients list, and then never mentions them again).  I basically did a dry roast of the spices and then sauteed the onions, added the chicken and cooked well.  We tried the "egg paratha" step and it came out terribly, so we scrapped that.  We just warmed up the bread, added the chicken, and drizzled with traditional NYC halal-cart white sauce (recipe here) instead of the suggested mint chutney.

All in all, definitely not as good as the street guys, but still tasty!