tale from the dosa shop
paddu against the clock
I’ve worked for a year-and-a-half now on Saturday mornings at a small and growing dosa shop. I won’t share the name, but many friends on this list have kindly come to see me at the counter where I take orders, chat with all types of people, make ever-new and spontaneous comments about the weather.
Since early summer, however, there has been increasing traffic at the workplace. I’ve been asked to go back-kitchen more often to work on food production. This intimidated me at first. I cook well in my home, but no amount of dinner party cooking can compare to what happens in a commercial kitchen. And even watching the several caterers in my extended family has given me little skill in the way of restaurant work, because restaurant work is deeply constrained by time.
You can not make too many mistakes. There are no undos or reset buttons. You have ten-or-so minutes on the clock with a finite amount of resources and it is your task to perform as close to perfect as possible in that time, or to risk disappointing someone who may never come back. And if you work does go the latter route, that person may then leave a bad review, which can easily escalate online and tank the entire business. Especially when a food operation is small, every second matters—at which point do you dollop the ghee onto the batter, how long do you keep a dosa on a griddle. The risks are, in my case, slightly offset by how deliciously prepared the batter is at the dosa shop I work at. Nonetheless, it is make-or-break at every moment.
It was with these high stakes that in mind that I found myself, this past weekend, assigned to make the paddu, or, as one funny customer called them, the “dosa gyoza,” batter that is poured into round divots in a griddle to create a small round dosa dumpling, of sorts.
I was excited, because the paddu, or guliyappa as it was known in my home, was a childhood favorite. My grandmother would serve them with a pat of butter and some earthy peanut podi. They were so adorable and round that I believed paddu was children’s food until I moved to Bengaluru, where I found paddu sold street-side everywhere, roasted in heavy oil, plated alongside a mound of coconut chutney. Eating them often involves the entire lower half of your face.
To start to prepare paddu, one must add oil to the griddle. Then, quickly pour the batter into the circular indents. This dosa shop adds a bit of dill, some very thinly diced onions, and a sprinkle of chili powder to their batter, which make the paddu something that can be eaten on its own even without chutney, or even without the usual potato and podi fillings of a typical dosa.
Once the batter begins to roast, a golden-brown ring appears around the perimeter of the circle it forms in the skillet, indicating that the bottom has likely cooked. This takes maybe four minutes on medium-high flame. Afterwards comes the whole movement of making paddu, which requires turning the dosa ball upside down until both sides have cooked.
But I was nervous for this step. The batter on the side facing upwards was still a little liquidy, and I didn’t want to leave the paddu long enough in the skillet for the bottom to char. And so, I made a quick decision to turn the paddu upside down with a small spatula, hoping that the uncooked batter would cook when it was upside down. It was a mistake. I tore open a paddu, and found, on the inside, a thin skin of raw, uncooked batter.
I tossed the whole batch away, tried again. This time, I made sure that the whites of the uncooked batter on the side facing upwards had gone solid and turned fluffy before I turned the paddu, which had gotten dangerously close to charring on the other side. I borrowed a toothpick and pierced through what appeared to be cooked-through skin. Wet, clumpy batter clung to the toothpick.
The clock was ticking. We’ve recently installed a digital interface to take orders, and the food item turns yellow when it’s going slower than expected, and then red when it’s officially too slow. The ticket was yellow. I couldn’t see the customer, but I imagined an irritated face.
I told myself it must be the griddle. I swapped it for a non-stick pan. This time, I used oil more efficiently. Whereas before I’d used oil as a way to add fat, I wielded it now to make sure the paddu cooked smoothly and well. A perfect batch appeared, or so it seemed by my toothpick test. I tore one open. A layer of uncooked batter.
Desperate, I called my brilliant coworker over. She flies between tasks with an intelligence so wide-spread that I feel lumbering and slow next to her. Sometimes, she is witty and easygoing, and other times, when orders grow urgent, she becomes extremely sharp and can fix pretty much anything. She poured the batter, roasted with ease, made a slightly mean joke about my mistaken paddu situation, scrubbed the side of a stove with sambar slopped down it, set a dozen whole eggs to boil, returned to the paddu and flipped them over, and in five minutes, created a perfectly-done batch.
The stakes of it all! Undercooked, the paddu might have led to food poisoning! Or at least a bad review. Overcooked, it would have been inedible, unservable, and would have also led to a bad review. Too many tries to cook it perfectly and the batter would run out. And, of course, this would have also led to a bad review.
It’s funny to write about these sorts of stakes on the internet, a faint, totalizing simulation of the real world. We have endless resources here and everything is forever. Which is maybe why writers—like me, at times—pull so much material from our experiences browsing the computer. It’s much harder to capture the delicate material of reality than it is to write about something that flits across our machines. Or why so many people seem to produce things entirely for this simulation, live and die entirely by social media’s hilt, avoid the race against time it takes to make something in the real world. It’s hard work to beat reality’s clock!
love a paniyaram, loved this essay!
This is great, thanks! Restaurant work is crazy hard. Does make this internet bit seem silly indeed.