Last Sunday, I had sushi rolls for lunch. I loved them. Were they authentically Japanese? No. They were as authentically Japanese as Dilip Dosanjh. But here’s the thing: Even though the chef would probably have been denied a visa to Japan if any Japanese official had seen what he was doing to Japanese food, I thought the rolls were entirely enjoyable.
That’s the thing about junk food. Yes, it isn’t authentic. And it’s often not made with much skill. But it fulfils some primeval need in us. And we enjoy it anyway.
Sadly, this is not true of all junk food. Some dishes work even if the chef is not highly trained and has no experience of the original. And some don’t work at all with disastrous results.
Here’s my guide to enjoying your junk food.
Sushi: In Japan, sushi is a great art. Most Japanese only eat nigiri: the kind where a piece of raw fish is perched on a pellet of rice. The quality of the fish must be perfect. It is not enough for it to be fresh. The chef must know how long to age it (in the fridge) before serving it.
The rice is an art form in itself. Chefs train for years to make sushi rice. Learning how to make the pellet also takes long: the rice must be warm and loosely put together.
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Try not to eat nigiri unless you are dealing with an experienced chef. The fish will be rubbish and the pellet will be cold rice, quickly squished together. This is not a dish suited to junk food.
However, there is another kind of globally popular sushi that you rarely find in Japan. The sushi roll that we know (with no seaweed on the outside) was probably invented in America and relies on a variety of non-Japanese ingredients including fried shrimp, avocado, spicy tuna and God alone knows what else.
Purists will turn their noses up at rolls but I think they work well , especially when you dunk the rice in soya — a move that would get you treated with horror and contempt in Japan.
It’s not Japanese. It’s junky. But it can be delicious.
Pizza: it is so hard to generalise about pizza because the dish has moved beyond Naples — beyond Italy, in fact — and there is no one way of making pizza. Who is to say that a New York slice is less an expression of pizza than a Marinara in Naples? They would laugh at you in Italy, if you topped your pizza with lots of peppers, salami, pepperoni (in the American sense) chicken, mushrooms etc. But for many pizza lovers, the toppings are the point of the pizza — even if Italians don’t always agree.
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So I hesitate to describe anything as junk pizza. My own rule is not to eat a pizza from one of the big chains (unless I am desperate) and to explore smaller operations.
In my experience, you don’t have to pay a lot to get an acceptable pizza. Just remember that it is a dish that requires a lot of attention. So avoid the pizza factories and then, by a process of trial and error try to find the ones you like. A general rule: No chains, and no five-star hotels.
Hot Dogs: Almost by definition, hot dogs are junk food. And yet it is almost impossible to get acceptable hot dogs in India. There are three problems: One: people don’t seem to like them (I am an exception) so they appear on fewer and fewer menus. Two: for some research chefs seem to think that pork sausages are a bad idea. So, the majority of hot dogs you will get are made from chicken sausage. In most of the world, there is no such thing as a chicken hot dog: The sausages are either made from pork or from beef or from a mixture of the two.
And three: even if you can find a hot dog made with pork sausage, the bread will be terrible. There is a whole article waiting to be done on how Indian restaurants don’t know how to make good buns for hot dogs or hamburgers but I’ll leave that for another time. Suffice it to say that it is next to impossible to get a good hot dog in India.
All of this is sad because the hot dog is the one fast food item that can be junky and still taste good. All over New York, you will find carts selling hot dogs for two or three dollars. The sausage will probably be made with the cheapest meat and the bun will be industrial. But somehow, it works. Sadly, we can’t even manage that in India.
Hamburger: The key to understanding a burger lies in understanding that it is a family of dishes, not a single dish.
There is, first of all, the chain hamburger served all over the world by American food giants. Even in those countries where they can use beef, the big chains treat the patty as the least important part of the burger. It is usually thin and tasteless. The flavour comes from the sauces they smear on it and the bun. The profits come from the French fries and milk shakes that go with the burgers. I do not eat fast-food chain hamburgers if I can help it.
Then there is the steakhouse burger where the meat patty, made usually from high quality meat (ideally beef) is large, is seared on the outside and is meltingly soft on the inside. Because this major cost is the meat, there is no junk food equivalent at low prices of this kind of burger.
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Then there are the burgers that come between these two extremes: Juicy Lucy burgers (invented in Minneapolis) with the cheese on the inside like a stuffing, Smash burgers (which I wrote about at length a few weeks ago), simpler burgers served by standalones and the like
Many of those can be good: Café Delhi Heights has built its reputations on the Juicy Lucy and Delhi and Mumbai are full of smaller establishments offering their own takes on the burger. (My favourite in Delhi is Akus.) I am not sure which of these would be called junk.
But if you want a hamburger, get used to the idea that a hamburger needs beef and you won’t get the real thing in India. However, if you are willing to compromise, there are many good burger places that serve hamburgers that no American would enjoy but which are more than adequate for us.
Ice-cream: Another of those foods where you are better off steering clear of the big brands. There are three basic categories. There are nationally advertised ice-creams made by multinationals. If you look closely you will find they avoid using the term ‘ice-cream’ in their advertising. That’s because they are not allowed to: their ice-creams are made with vegetable fat and not dairy. The Magnum which is imported into India is an exception. But on the whole the multinational products are not junk ice-cream. They are just garbage.
Then there are the fruit flavoured ice-creams which brag about the freshness of their fruit. Natural of Juhu-Vile-Parle was the first one I tried years ago but there are now many others. This is a divisive subject. In my experience, too many of them rely too much on the fruit and pay too little attention to the basic ice-cream. Many are not stable enough to last very long.
And then there are the smaller local brands, some of which are outstanding. We ate Chubby Cheeks and Revasser at home in Delhi recently and I recommended them.
Junk vs Fast: All too often we confuse junk food with fast food. These days fast food has come to mean food made by large chains at low cost. There is very little I would order from chains like those. Yes, there are chains where the food is made fresh from locally sourced ingredients but unfortunately, they are outnumbered by machine-made food chains.
The term ‘junk food’ has also come to mean unhealthy food. The thing to remember about unhealthy food is that it can come from anywhere. Your kitchen may be full of unhealthy food if you buy lots of ultra processed packaged foods. A sushi roll made with fish and rice is not unhealthy. But in a gastronomic sense it is junk sushi, nothing like the real thing.
The broad conclusion is: food doesn’t have to be expensive, it doesn’t have to come from heavily advertised brands and it doesn’t ever have to be authentic to the original. You are better off eating fresh food made by smaller local producers. It won’t win Michelin stars. But it can be delicious. Junk is better than garbage.
