Kumaoni & Garhwali cuisine

🍲Traditional Food of Uttarakhand

The everyday cooking of the hills runs on hardy mountain grains and pulses: mandua and jhangora millet, black bhatt soybean, horse gram and foraged greens, finished with mustard oil and crackling jakhya. Here is that food, dish by dish.

Pahadi food is mountain food. It leans on what grows on cold, steep terraces rather than on rich gravies, so the flavours are earthy and the dishes are built to warm and sustain. Kumaon and Garhwal share most of this table, with small differences in name and method. Below, the dishes are grouped by kind, from the famous sweets of Almora to the dals and greens that make up a daily thali.

🍬 Sweets

Almora's signature sweet and the one souvenir every visitor carries home. Khoya is slow-roasted until it turns a deep chocolate brown, set into fudge, cut into cubes and rolled in tiny white sugar balls that give it a crunchy shell.

Roasted khoya and cane sugar

A fresh-khoya sweet from Almora, scented with cardamom and wrapped in a cone of green malu leaf. The leaf is not eaten; it perfumes the khoya and is what gives singori its cone shape and its name. Best eaten the day it is made.

Fresh khoya and malu leaf

Kumaon & Garhwal

A deep-fried rice-and-jaggery sweet that is part of almost every Pahadi wedding. In Garhwal and Kumaon, arsa is traditionally sent with a daughter to her new home, so the recipe carries a lot of sentiment along with its dark, chewy sweetness.

Rice and jaggery

Jhangora ki Kheer

Kumaon & Garhwal

A pudding made from jhangora, the barnyard millet that grows across the hills, simmered slowly in milk instead of rice. It is lighter than rice kheer and often eaten on fasting days, finished with cardamom and a few nuts.

Barnyard millet (jhangora)

Kumaon & Garhwal

A sweet, spiral-shaped fritter piped into hot oil, crisp at the edges and soft inside. Singal turns up at festivals and family functions, flavoured with fennel and sometimes a little banana in the batter.

Semolina and curd

The festival bread-sweet of Makar Sankranti in Kumaon. Sweet wheat dough is shaped into little birds, knots and rings, deep-fried, and strung into garlands that children wear before sharing them with the crows on the morning of the ghughutia festival.

Wheat flour and jaggery

Kumaon & Garhwal

Little jaggery-sweetened fritters, crisp outside and cakey inside, made quickly from whatever is in the kitchen. Gulgule are festival and rainy-day food across the hills, spiced with fennel and a pinch of cardamom.

Wheat flour and jaggery

🍲 Mains: dals & curries

Often called the state dish of Uttarakhand, kafuli is a thick green curry of spinach and fenugreek leaves cooked slowly in an iron kadhai and bound with a little rice or gram-flour paste. It is simple, iron-rich winter food, eaten with rice or mandua roti.

Spinach and fenugreek greens

A Garhwali black-gram dal with a deep, roasted, almost smoky flavour. The urad is dry-roasted and ground before cooking, which is what sets chainsoo apart from an everyday dal, and it is traditionally cooked slow in an iron pot for its colour and iron.

Black gram (urad) dal

A soupy Garhwali dal made from lentils, usually gahat or a mix, that are soaked overnight and ground before cooking. Phaanu is thinner and more broth-like than chainsoo and often appears on festival tables.

Bhatt ki Churkani

A Kumaoni curry of black soybeans, roasted until they pop and then simmered into a thick, dark, savoury gravy thickened with a little flour. It is warming winter food, rich in protein, and a fixture of the Kumaoni everyday table.

Black soybean (bhatt)

Horse gram is the hills' winter workhorse pulse, and this slow-cooked dal is its plainest, most comforting form. Gahat is prized in the mountains as a warming food and a folk remedy for kidney stones, and the same pulse turns up in gahat ke paranthe and thick ras.

Horse gram (gahat)

A Garhwali curry named for the way its main vegetable is prepared: thecha means to pound, so the radish or potato is coarsely crushed rather than neatly cut, which lets it soak up the spices. Winter radish thechwani, often cooked with gahat, is the classic version.

Radish or potato

A Kumaoni dal made by grinding soaked bhatt or gahat to a paste and simmering it into a thick, spiced gravy. It is close kin to phaanu across the border in Garhwal, and it is poured generously over hot rice.

Ground bhatt or gahat

A Kali Kumaon speciality most associated with Champawat, ras is a thin dal made by cooking several kinds of lentil together and binding the broth with a little mandua flour. Each household has its own mix, and it is ladled over rice like a nourishing soup.

Many lentils cooked together

A Kumaoni green curry of spinach cooked down and thickened with a rice-flour paste, close to Garhwal's kafuli but with its own local character. It is mild, green and iron-rich, eaten with plain rice.

Spinach with rice paste

Gaderi ki Sabzi

Kumaon & Garhwal

Gaderi, the hill taro or colocasia, cooked into a spiced curry that is soft and slightly sticky. It is a favourite at Ghee Sankranti and other harvest days, when the new tubers are dug, and it goes equally well with rice or roti.

Colocasia (taro) tubers

The Pahadi take on kadhi: buttermilk or curd whisked with gram flour, simmered smooth and tempered, usually with the crackle of jakhya seeds. Light and tangy, jholi is comfort food poured over a plate of rice.

Curd and gram flour

A thick Garhwali porridge stirred from mandua flour and hot water until it comes together into a soft, dark mass, finished with mustard oil. Baadi is quick, warming and deeply traditional, usually eaten with phaanu or gahat and a spoon of ghee.

Mandua (finger millet) flour

🫓 Breads

Kumaon & Garhwal

The daily bread of the hills, made from mandua, the finger millet also known as ragi or koda. The dark dough is kneaded with hot water and patted out by hand into rotis that are heavier and more filling than wheat, and far richer in iron and calcium.

Finger millet (mandua / ragi)

🥔 Snacks

Kumaon & Garhwal

The best-loved everyday Pahadi dish: boiled potato cubes tossed in mustard oil with jakhya seeds that crackle like cumin, red chilli and coriander. It is picnic food, festival food and the standard partner to bhang chutney and cucumber raita.

Potato and jakhya

🥗 Sides

Sisunak Saag (Nettle Greens)

Kumaon & Garhwal

A foraged winter green made from young stinging-nettle tops. Cooking tames the sting completely and leaves a deep, spinach-like green that hill families have eaten for generations as a tonic against the cold.

Stinging nettle (sisun / kandali)

A sharp, sunny-yellow raita that is unmistakably Kumaoni. Grated cucumber or radish goes into whisked curd with turmeric and a paste of roasted mustard seeds, which gives it a nose-tingling kick quite unlike the mild raita of the plains.

Curd, cucumber and mustard

🌶️ Chutneys

Bhang ki Chutney

Kumaon & Garhwal

A nutty, tangy chutney ground from roasted hemp seeds - the edible, non-intoxicating seed, not the leaf. Toasting brings out an almost peanut-like richness that is balanced with lemon, green chilli and coriander, and it is the classic dip for aloo ke gutke.

Roasted hemp seeds

Recipes are informational and written for general reference. Quantities are to taste and methods vary from kitchen to kitchen.