One of my favourite culinary experiences is the visit to the mothership. Dosas in south Bengaluru. Tacos and tamales in Mexican markets. Burgers at American diners. Fish and chips in English seaside towns.

Indore, a city in the central Indian state of Madhya Pradesh, is supposed to be the mothership for chaat, the Indian roadside snack food. Perhaps the quintessential chaat dish is pani puri, little deep-fried dough pockets that are punched with the thumb and filled with a vegetable or lentil mixture, then dipped into the pani or water — a spicy, sweet-sour liquid featuring the big flavours of chaat: tamarind, green chilli, coriander leaves, mint, sugar and black salt.

I love how mothership experiences surprise with their simplicity. As dishes move away from place of origin, cooks rely more on memory, and memory is fallible. It’s easy to forget to trust the basics, which is why a pizza often becomes more about exotic toppings than a well-made base. And that’s the other revelation about the mothership visit — the shift of emphasis that makes you look at a familiar food in a totally different way.

The best tacos, for example, are about a great tortilla first, with a small amount of filling and a dash or two of salsa and onion. More distant ones focus on the fillings, overstuffing a bland packaged tortilla with meats and sauces and — shudder — dollops of cheese. With the best burgers the bun is never an afterthought.

Smooth combination

I had the same epiphany with the Indorian pani puri even before I ate it. Looking at the rich, crumbly puris, I realised that every pani puri I’d had before, didn’t care about this fundamental ingredient, using bland, dry puris with nearly no character. And with a good puri, the potato filling could be simple, and the sauce was a smooth combination of sweet, spicy and sour without being too intense or too spiky, as happens in less skilled hands. In fact, this region is masterful at folding sweet flavours into savoury dishes. Of course, one of the reasons for simplicity at source, is the quality of local ingredients. My friend who spends a lot of time in Cyprus, talks about the local olive oil that neighbours come round and leave at the door, cloudy and fresh but simply poured into old soft drink bottles. It’s easy to see how a basic dish from Cyprus can need embellishment as it travels further from olive trees and backyard oil presses.

But going back to source isn’t always about simplicity. Some royal Indian dishes in their original form use 40 or 50 ingredients and several stages of cooking. The Indore aloo tikki chaat (potato croquette), seemingly just a deep-fried potato sphere about the size of a golf ball, has a perfectly crispy outer layer and a fluffy layer of potato. Then to my surprise, there was a filling of coconut spiced with fennel and garnished with pomegranate seeds and caraway. Over this was just a splash of a spicy green, and sweetish red chutney, in perfect balance. That’s a lot of sophistication and unexpected turns for a dish served so simply by the side of a road.

In the end, it’s about honesty, which can be tasted. In fact, it can be seen — sometimes you know even before eating that a dish is going to be true, and it’s irrelevant at this point whether you like it or not.

These experiences move me and thrill me, and makes some people roll their eyes at my obsession with food. But I think it’s important not to forget how deep it runs. After all, we are made of it.

Gautam Raja is a journalist based in Bengaluru, India.