Today's Google Doodle (12 July) is all about the South Asian street food pani puri.
Head to the search engine’s home page and you’ll be greeted by a candy-colored cartoon, celebrating the dish which consists of a light, crisp deep-fried shell stuffed with potatoes, chickpeas, spices and flavoured waters.
The interactive design then invites you to fill out hungry customers’ orders: choosing the puris that match their flavour and quantity preferences as quickly as you can.
So why did Doodle choose this theme – sweet though it is – for a random Wednesday in July?
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Well, on this day back in 2015, in the Indian city of Indore, a restaurant called Indori Zayka and Dainik Bhaskar earned itself the world record for serving the most varieties of the treat.
It offered punters a lip-smacking 51flavours, under the guidance of Masterchef Neha Shah, as Google notes in its blurb to the artistic homage.
The snack will be familiar to many, but perhaps under a different name. This is because there are a plethora of regional variations that exist across India.
In Maharashtra and Andhra Pradesh, the name pani puri denotes the bite-sized street food which is commonly filled with boiled chickpeas, a white pea mixture, and sprouts dipped in tangy and spicy water (pani).
In the northern Indian states of Punjab, Jammu and Kashmir, and New Delhi, the potato and chickpea-filled delight is known as gol gappe or gol gappa, and is soaked in lemony-spiced jaljeera water.
In West Bengal and parts of Bihar and Jharkhand, they call the treats puchkas or fuchkas, using tamarind pulp as their key ingredient.
In a nutshell – or a delicate, fried puri shell, if you’d prefer – these beloved snacks take many iterations but all have one thing in common: they should be eaten quickly to avoid sogginess or leaking.
Still, given how tasty they are, it’s hardly a tall order to make sure you devour them in one go.
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