Tod Rasmussen/The Reporter
Balwinder Pahal of Vallejo (center) talks with friends while eating in the traditional manner - seated on the floor - at the Sikh Temple langar. The Fairfield temple also provides simple tables and chairs for Americanized Sikhs.
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By Karen Nolan/Reporter Staff
Six o'clock on a Sunday morning, and the kitchen attached to the Guru Nanuk Sikh Temple in rural Fairfield has been teeming with activity for two hours already.
A tub full of eggplant is waiting to be sliced. Peeled potatoes sit covered in water. On two nearby tables, 500 handmade and now frozen samosas - triangle-shaped pastries filled today with boiled potatoes, peas, cilantro and jalepnos - are thawing.
An industrial-sized cooking pot filled with spinach, mustard greens, broccoli and cabbage - freshly purchased at a farmer's market and finely chopped the night before - simmers on a stove.
At another burner, Gurmeet K. Chanda employs a wooden paddle almost as tall as she is to stir an equally large pot filled with milk and rice that will become this afternoon's dessert.
And eight people are waiting for a pair of grills to heat up so they can begin the assembly-line process of making roti, a traditional flatbread that Sikhs in Solano County call "tortillas."
Perhaps the most extraordinary thing about all of this hubbub is that it is so very ordinary within the Sikh community.
Every Sunday - and often on other days as well - a Sikh family assumes the duty of feeding breakfast and lunch to the hundreds of people who come to worship at the Rockville Road temple.
Feeding worshipers at the temple, or gurdwara, is a tradition that dates back more than 500 years, to the founding of the Sikh religion by Guru Nanak Dev in India, according to "The Oxford Dictionary of World Religions," edited by John Bowker.
Part outreach and part convenience, the community kitchen, known as a "langar," served both the poor and those who traveled great distances to attend services.
As a religion that preached equality in a culture accustomed to castes, the ability to have people of all backgrounds work together to prepare food and then sit and eat as one proved a very real way of putting faith into practice.
As Sikhs have spread out across the globe, they have had to make minor adaptations to the langar custom, but the heart of the tradition remains intact.
The men and women who prepare the food, for instance, still keep their heads covered while working in the kitchen. Only vegetarian food is prepared, so as not to exclude anyone whose dietary practices may forbid meat.
And, while appetizers and breakfast foods can be eaten at any time, dishes prepared for the main feast cannot be tasted - even by the cooks - until they have been blessed in the temple.
Even the bread-making process hearkens to the community's roots in India.
The recipe is simple, according to Sarjeet Nagra of Vallejo, who attended a special Saturday night langar - the word now refers to both the kitchen and the meal itself - put on by a family praying for an ailing relative.
Mix flour and water to form a dough and "at the end, add a teaspoon of oil so it doesn't stick," Nagra says. Pat out the dough and roll it into either a circle or square. Cook it on a griddle or grill and top it with butter or ghee. "It's the recipe I give everybody at work."
The flour Nagra uses is not typical American white flour, but a special blend of wheat and malted barley. Available in Indian groceries, its label clearly states it is for roti.
As with all directions handed down by demonstration rather than recipe cards, Nagra's instructions to do not fully account for the nuances of roti-making.
"This is how we learned," Kamaljeet Singh Dhanda of Vallejo says as she watches her 16-year-old daughter add another cream-colored circle of dough to a grill, where more than a dozen flatbreads in various stages of doneness are cooking.
Constant motion is among the tricks to perfect roti, and Singh Dhanda deftly wields a spatula to flip roti after roti until they are deep golden in color and splotched with dark brown circles, signifying the air bubbles that have formed in the unleavened dough.
From the grill, the rotis go to Singh Dhanda's 15-year-old daughter, who runs a stick of butter over the tops and wraps them, in batches of 25, in foil. To keep them warm for dinner, the foil packets are placed in a pair of insulated and cloth-lined coolers.
Grilling roti keeps Singh Dhanda's hands and eyes busy, but gives her time to talk about her life. Like a number of Sikhs at the Fairfield temple, she was born in Fiji and grew up eating taro root rather than potatoes in traditional Indian recipes.
Since taro is available in local markets, it regularly crops up in dishes at the Fairfield temple. Singh Dhanda, however, switched to potatoes after marrying her India-born husband 18 years ago. The couple came to the Bay Area shortly after they married, and their three daughters were born here.
When the youngest child, now 10, reached school-age, Singh Dhanda enrolled in Napa Valley College and became a licensed vocational nurse. She works in a convalescent care home in Vallejo.
As Singh Dhanda talks and turns the roti, the assembly line at the table behind her stays in constant motion. Two and sometimes four people attack the mountain of dough, pinching off egg-sized chunks and expertly rolling them into balls. Another pair of workers takes rolling pins to the balls, flattening them into uniformly shaped circles about 1/4-inch thick. The entire process, which will produce some 500 rotis, will take 2 1/2 hours.
The sheer number of hands needed to make this many flatbreads puts roti production at center stage. But there are other preparations going on in other areas of the commercial kitchen.
Kamaljeet's husband, Tara Singh Dhanda, is supervising the creation of a yogurt-based side dish. He dumps five 64-ounce cartons of fat-free yogurt into a 5-gallon bucket, then adds buttermilk until the container is nearly full.
Meanwhile, a couple of 14-ounce bags of "plain boondi" - tiny balls of dried graham flour, oil and salt, available in Indian markets - have been allowed to soak for about five minutes in warm water. The boondi is drained and, along with a coffee-grinder full of ground cumin seeds, added to the yogurt-buttermilk mixture, which has been transferred to a larger bowl.
Boondi adds a bit of texture to the soupy yogurt-buttermilk mixture, which itself provides a cool contrast to dishes spiced with jalapenos.
While Indian food can be fiery hot, dishes prepared for the langar are kept tame because not every Sikh enjoys spicy food.
For those who do, however, there will be what Tara Singh Dhanda calls "pickles." To a large can of Achar Pachranga - mangoes, limes, chiles and other fruits or vegetables seasoned with fenugreek, fennel, coriander, turmeric, red chilies, cumin and negalb and packed in oil - he will add julienned carrots, rings of red onions and fresh jalapenos.
Nearly every langar meal also includes "sagg," or cooked greens. While the Singh Dhanda family's recipe calls for mustard leaves, broccoli, spinach and cabbage, a sagg prepared for Saturday's langar included taro leaves, again reflecting the Fijian influence.
Food for each langar must be freshly prepared, and at one point Saturday night an industrial-sized pot of hot sagg could be seen simmering next to an equally large pan of cut greens that would become Sunday's dish.
It's a lot of food, but little goes to waste. Diners and hosts alike take home the leftovers. "We don't believe in throwing away food," says Nagra.
Once the main langar meal has been prepared, a scoop of each dish will be put in bowls that are covered and placed at the altar in the temple. After the food has been blessed, it will be returned to the kitchen and mixed back into the larger pots.
The "blessing food" can then be served in the dining hall, which itself reflects a changing culture: Half the area is spread with rugs and mats for those who keep the tradition of sitting on the floor. The other half contains simple tables and folding chairs for those who prefer to follow the American custom.
The main meal won't be served until well past noon - a long time to go without nourishment, especially for those who have been cooking all morning. To stave off hunger, a breakfast of "appetizers" is made available to all.
There are the ubiquitous sweets, many of which are purchased from shops or restaurants, such as Stara Indian Cuisine in Vallejo. There is homemade chai, a loose-leaf tea simmered with milk and sugar and flavored with fennel seeds, cloves or cardamom.
And there are hot appetizers, including the samosas, deep fried to a golden brown, and freshly made pagoras: deep-fried, fritter-like balls of spinach and potatoes, spiced with ginger, garlic, green peppers, salt, cilantro and jalapenos and held together with a batter of buttermilk and graham flour.
Both are served with chutney or ketchup, which provide a sweet contrast to the mouthful of flavor imparted by the jalapenos.
While breakfast doesn't officially start until 10 a.m., some worshipers begin arriving shortly after 9.
"It's fine," says Tara Singh Dhanda as he hastily sets up the serving bar. "That's why we are here - to serve them. And sometimes we come early, too."
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Among the main langar dishes, vegetable curry is a favorite. It is also easy to prepare at home, albeit in smaller proportions, according to Sarjeet Nagra of Vallejo and Basant Sidhu of Vacaville.
Over a plate full of food at the Fairfield temple, they agreed on this recipe for Aloogobhi, a curry with potatoes and cauliflower.
Aloogobhi
(Potato and Cauliflower Curry)
2 to 3 tablespoons vegetable oil
1/4 teaspoon mustard seed
1/4 teaspoon cumin
1/2 onion
1 clove garlic
1 teaspoon minced fresh ginger
Fresh serrano or jalapeno chile, minced (amount according to taste, or omit altogether)
Curry spices: 1 teaspoon masala, 1 teaspoon tumeric
Salt, to taste
2 medium potatoes, cubed
1 head cauliflower
Heat the oil over medium high heat with the mustard seeds and cumin.
Add onion, garlic, ginger and chili pepper and sautee until the onion is translucent. Add the curry spices and mix well
Add the potatoes and cauliflower. Cover the pot and cook over low heat, stirring occasionally, until the vegetables are cooked through.
Serve with rice and roti.
Foods similar to those served at a langar will be available during the Punjabi Heritage Festival, which begins at 5 p.m. Saturday at the Fairfield Center for Creative Arts, 1035 Texas St. Admission is free, but seating is limited. Call 428-7662 or visit the Punjabi American Cultural Association's Web site, www.pacassociation.org.