In the U.S., we’re used to eating yogurt for breakfast like it’s an ice cream sundae. We toss on some fruit, granola, a drizzle of honey, an assortment of powders and pollens or whatever. Sometimes the yogurt itself is flavored like ice cream or strawberry cheesecake or Boston cream pie. A lot of it: Blech!
By contrast, in Indian cuisine yogurt is, more often than not, savory. It’s eaten with every meal, and it’s flavored not with fake strawberry powder but with freshly roasted cumin or crisped-up curry leaves. What I’m trying to say is: Our yogurt is better.
Yogurt is essential to Indian cuisine. In a category of food filled with hearty, spicy stews, yogurt is a necessary refresher for tempering all that heat—and it does a far better job at that than water or beer. In our house, we, like many Indian families, make our own yogurt regularly, and have a culture that’s been hanging around in our freezer for decades. And out of all the yogurt-filled dishes in Indian cuisine—lassi (like a smoothie), dahi vada (yogurt dumplings), kadhi (a yogurt-based stew)—the most wonderful and accessible is raita.
Kheera (cucumber) raita at Babu Ji in New York.
Raita is a condiment/side dish typically made of yogurt plus some combination of vegetables, spices, and if it’s a fancy occasion, teeny fritters made of chickpea flour called boondi. I can’t imagine an Indian meal without raita. It’s what I eat when I need to come up for air in the midst of all those sabzis and dals. It’s how I survive my mom’s delicious but somewhat cruel addition of hidden whole dried red chiles to most of her food.
The other thing I like about raita is that it’s not a throwaway part of a meal like a basket of stale bread or an awkward mid-dinner cup of sorbet. It’s seasoned in the same layered way as other Indian dishes—usually with small amounts of sugar, salt, and some spice combo. And there’s texture, too, whether from grated cucumber or diced potatoes. It has the nuance of Indian cooking but also plays that much-needed role of the refresher.
We love raita in our family so much that we even have raita-related inside jokes. Like when my uncle and aunt ended up at dinner with my uncle’s ex-girlfriend in Delhi, and she tried to serve them raita made with cauliflower (which is blasphemous, I found out, because cauliflower ends up soggy and gross when mixed with yogurt). The phrase cauliflower raita is enough to make any member in our family burst into laughter. Weird, I know.
