Patna travel guide

Litti chokha

Bihar and Jharkhand's great rustic combination—wheat flour balls stuffed with roasted sattu (bengal gram), cooked directly in fire until charred, split open and drenched in ghee; eaten with smoky mashed potato-tomato-brinjal chokha; perhaps India's most primal meal

Sattu paratha

Bihar and Jharkhand's power food—roasted bengal gram flour mixed with raw mustard oil, green chili, ginger and onion, stuffed into wheat dough and cooked on a tawa; a Bihar farmer's lunch, now known to bodybuilders as a traditional high-protein pre-workout meal

Chura-dahi

Bihar's essential combination—flat-beaten rice (chura) soaked in fresh curd with raw sugar and sometimes mashed banana; a non-cooked, cooling, fragrant breakfast eaten at every Bihar household and on every India-Pakistan cricket match day in Patna

Khaja

Odisha and Bihar's festival sweet—thin layers of flaky pastry made from wheat flour and pure ghee, deep-fried and soaked in sugar syrup; the Puri khaja is offered as mahaprasad at the Jagannath temple; the crunchy layers absorb temple blessing according to devotees' belief

Thekua

Jharkhand and Bihar's festival sweet—wheat flour mixed with jaggery, ghee and coconut, pressed into elaborate molds and deep-fried; made for the Chhath Puja festival; the sun deity Chhathi Maiya is worshipped through the offering of thekua; extremely long shelf life

Tilkut

Gaya and Bihar's sesame sweet—roasted white sesame seeds pounded with jaggery or sugar into a firm slab that shatters; the Gaya winter market has artisans pounding tilkut with wooden mallets 6 hours a day; eaten during Makar Sankranti; the pounding is as much a performance as a recipe