old delhi spice market.
In the Indian metropolis of Delhi, where fast-paced, cell-phone toting characters out of Monsoon Wedding live side by side with barefoot rickshaw wallahs cycling past roaming cows in the road, we visited the largest spice market in all of Asia, the bustling Khari Baoli bazaar. At once, all our senses were over-stimulated to an amplified level. Open air shops on both sides of the road displayed sackcloth bags filled with pungent spices, bushels of fragrant flowers, nuts and sticky dried fruits, mountains of bright orange turmeric, mouth-watering sweets, gallons of gooey ghee and enough tea to steep the Indian ocean. We could barely breath. The intense combination of indiscernible aromas oscillated our insides between gagging nausea and voracious hunger.
Carried along by the throngs of merchants corralled on the sidewalks, we watched as businessmen from all over India tested quality with a sniff or a taste and marked a deal with a head waggle. Shopkeepers weighed out goods the old-fashioned way, with iron weights on a balance scale. In the street, thin men carried burlap sacks bigger and heavier than their own bodies, loading them onto hand drawn wooden carts. Whether you need 5 grams or 500 kilos, goods are sold in bulk at rock-bottom wholesale prices. We walked away with precious clear gift boxes filled with delicate red saffron strands from Kashmir. This is the ideal place to look at some of the spices used to make masala chai, and their medicinal properties.
