Magadh
Patna, Gaya, Nalanda
Litti chokha and tilkut
The south of the state, and the part most people mean when they say Bihari food. Litti belongs here — wheat, sattu, coal — and Gaya makes the tilkut that everything else is measured against.
About Bihar
About Bihar
The food makes more sense when you know where it comes from.
Bihari food is built around three things that grow well there and travel well: wheat, gram, and mustard. Sattu is roasted gram ground to a powder — it needs no cooking, keeps for months, and carries more protein than most things people pay a premium for. Litti is what happens when you decide bread should also be a meal. Chokha is vegetables charred over the same fire, mashed with raw mustard oil.
None of it was designed to be impressive. It was designed to be cheap, filling and portable, by people who often had to carry lunch a long way. That it happens to be genuinely good is a side effect — and the reason it has survived being unfashionable for about fifty years.
Regions
Three regions, three kitchens
Bihar is not one cuisine, and pretending otherwise flattens the interesting parts.
Mithila
Darbhanga, Madhubani, Samastipur
Makhana, dal pitha, kheer
Ponds and paddy. Nearly all of India's makhana is grown here, and the cooking leans lighter — steamed pitha, mustard-forward curries, less frying than the south.
Bhojpur
Ara, Buxar, Siwan
Sattu, ghugni, chokha
Sattu country. Drunk in summer, stuffed into paratha, eaten as ladoo — the Bhojpuri diaspora carried it to Mauritius, Fiji and the Caribbean, which is why you find sattu in places Bihar has never traded with directly.
Calendar
The food follows the festivals
Some of our menu appears for two weeks a year and then goes away. That is not scarcity marketing — it is when the dish belongs.
Chhath
Oct–NovThekua, kheer, seasonal fruit
Four days, no onion, no garlic, and standing in a river at sunrise. Thekua is the prasad, and every household makes its own — which is why ours is a recipe, not a formula.
Makar Sankranti
14 JanuaryDahi chura, tilkut, lai
Chura with thick curd and jaggery in the morning; sesame and jaggery all day. The whole state eats roughly the same breakfast on the same morning.
Holi
MarchMalpua, pua, kachri
Frying day. Malpua soaked in cardamom syrup, eaten warm, in quantities nobody admits to afterwards.
Eat it, or cook it
We deliver it in Hyderabad, post it anywhere in India, and publish the recipes if you would rather make it yourself.