Savji - Cuisine

Cuisine

Savji community is known for its hot and spicy non vegetarian delicacies and Savji masala in places where Savjis are concentrated in large numbers. Majority of the Savji people are non-vegetarian and hence preparation of variety of meat dishes is very common in the community. Goat meat, chicken and fish forms major component of Savji cuisine along with other vegetarian dishes. Alcohol consumption is not restricted in the community. Some of the common recipes include edmi (puris made of wheat flour, gram flour, chilies and other spices), khaimo or kheema (minced goat meat), shakanu chaknu (goat and chicken curry) prepared in special Savji spices.

Savji food is famous for its very hot and spicy flavor in many cities (where they are in large number) served in small family style restaurants called Savji khanavali or "Savji hotel" or bhojanalaya, found in large numbers in places like Hubli, Bangalore, Belgaum in Karnataka, Nagpur and Solapur in Maharashtra. There are a line of Savji bhojanalays in Nagpur that are very popular in Maharashtra. So much so that, the Indian chef Sanjeev Kapoor once featured Savji mutton on one of his shows and its recipe is also listed on his website.

Besides the non vegetarian cuisines Savji sweets like malido (made of coarsely ground wheat chapatis) sweetened with jaggery with a good dash of roasted gram, roasted pea nuts, grated coconut and other condiments like nutmeg, cardamom, poppy seeds etc. Chonga, chakkole, labshi, shervo, pure, kanola, puran poli and mithi dal are also most commonly cooked sweets. The influence of other communities can be seen from these cuisines: puran poli is typically a Maharashtrian cuisine, mithi dal is nothing but hygru made by the North Karnataka Brahmins, chonga and malido are made by the Muslim community in Hyderabad, and labshi is a sweet commonly prepared by the Saurashtrians in Gujarat.