TacoCat's TrEats #197: Trying new Street Snacks for Ramadan! 🌙

Hey Hive!

This past month was Ramadan, which is the ninth month of the Islamic calendar, observed by Muslims worldwide as a month of fasting, prayer, reflection, and community. In Singapore we have quite a large community of Muslims so Ramadan is a big deal here. This year, it runs from 10 March to 9 April 2024 in Singapore and during the fasting month, many bazaars and night markets pop up across the island offering visitors shopping, entertainment, and most importantly, good food in droves.

In my neighbourhood we actually had two bazaars/night markets open up for Ramadan this year! It was quite a sight with so huge tents and many stalls around lining the streets.

There was a huge section of food stalls and across the street was another huge tent of stalls selling packaged snacks, clothes and other souvenirs.

I wish I had taken more photos because it was honestly pretty impressive and we've never had such a huge bazaar in our area before. We're not Muslim and don't really patronise these bazaars whenever Ramadan comes around since the food can be quite overpriced, and there are certain bazaars that are too popular and overcrowded.

Thankfully there wasn't much of a crowd in our neighbourhood but there was a surprising amount of stalls! One of the stalls caught our eye since they were selling vadai, which is one of our favourite street snacks!

Vadai is a savoury fried snack similar to a dough fritter or a doughnut native to India. Since I don't have much of a sweet tooth I definitely prefer vadai over the usual sweet doughnuts. These also have different fillings typically vegetables or seafood.

There were quite a few vadai stalls in the bazaar but they were all priced the same way. This stall had mini ones and were selling 10 mini vadais for $4 which is pretty alright I guess. We've never tried a mini vadai before so we were quite curious how it would taste compared to the regular ones. This stall had Vegetable, Chicken and Anchovy fillings for the vadai.

We ordered a pack of 10 and thankfully the owner even let us choose split the 10 across a few different flavours! So we split 3-3-4 between the three flavours.

The vadai were out for a while so they weren't crispy anymore, so we decided to bring them home to air fry them before trying.

The other stall that caught my eye was this one selling Pani Puri which I've actually never tried before.

Pani Puri is another common Indian street food and they are savoury stuffed potato puffs garnished with yogurt, tamarind sauce, sev, fried shallots and topped with pomegranate. They called it potato puff but it's more like a fried hollow shell made with potato flour I assume.

I think I've heard of this street food before but I must've confused it with another food since I didn't know it looked like this. But it was very interesting to see how the stall owner made it. She had buckets full of the different ingredients for the fillings and filled up the shells on the spot after we ordered. This one was a bit more pricey, I think it was $7 for one set which came with 5 Pani Puri.

We ordered takeaway for both snacks and brought them home since we wanted to air fry the vadai so it would be crispy.

After we fried them they were delicious! They were crispy on the outside, fluffy on the inside and so savoury!

Although we were disappointed with the so-called Chicken vadai since it was more like a chicken sausage and tbh didn't taste like it complemented the vadai dough well. The vegetable and anchovy ones are a lot better since we're used to those flavours.

I was really interested in trying the Pani Puri since I've never had it before. It looked pretty interesting and had an aroma full of different spices.

The set of 5 Pani Puri came with a cup of tamarind sauce and we're supposed to pour it into the shell and filling before eating so that's what we did. The sauce smelled of plum powder to me which may have been sprinkled on top.

I couldn't take a picture of what it looks like after pouring the sauce since it soaks up so quickly and I had to eat it quick lest it disintegrate but it was an interesting medley of flavours. The pomegranate was crunchy while the yogurt was quite overpowering on the rest of the fillings. It was mostly sour and tangy though. I thought it would be more on the sweet side since it looked like a dessert of sorts but it was interesting.

I'm not sure I would buy this again but it was a good experience to try a new snack in my home country. Although we have our difficulties I'm glad Singapore is multicultural and we can enjoy foods and festivals from so many different cuisines on our little island nation.

Thanks so much for reading!

To find out more about me, check out my intro post here!

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Check out my previous post in this series!
TacoCat's TrEats #196: Savouring a Family Favourite Chicken Rice! 🐔🍚