What is pani puri? The South Asian street food featured on Google Doodle

Today's Google Doodle (12 July) is all about the South Asian street food pani puri.

Head to the search engine’s home page and you’ll be greeted by a candy-colored cartoon, celebrating the dish which consists of a light, crisp deep-fried shell stuffed with potatoes, chickpeas, spices and flavoured waters.

The interactive design then invites you to fill out hungry customers’ orders: choosing the puris that match their flavour and quantity preferences as quickly as you can.

So why did Doodle choose this theme – sweet though it is – for a random Wednesday in July?

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Well, on this day back in 2015, in the Indian city of Indore, a restaurant called Indori Zayka and Dainik Bhaskar earned itself the world record for serving the most varieties of the treat.

It offered punters a lip-smacking 51flavours, under the guidance of Masterchef Neha Shah, as Google notes in its blurb to the artistic homage.

Head to Google's home page for a go at its light-hearted puri-inspired gameGoogle

The snack will be familiar to many, but perhaps under a different name. This is because there are a plethora of regional variations that exist across India.

In Maharashtra and Andhra Pradesh, the name pani puri denotes the bite-sized street food which is commonly filled with boiled chickpeas, a white pea mixture, and sprouts dipped in tangy and spicy water (pani).

In the northern Indian states of Punjab, Jammu and Kashmir, and New Delhi, the potato and chickpea-filled delight is known as gol gappe or gol gappa, and is soaked in lemony-spiced jaljeera water.

In West Bengal and parts of Bihar and Jharkhand, they call the treats puchkas or fuchkas, using tamarind pulp as their key ingredient.

The crisp puri shells are stuffed with a variety of different flavoursiStock

In a nutshell – or a delicate, fried puri shell, if you’d prefer – these beloved snacks take many iterations but all have one thing in common: they should be eaten quickly to avoid sogginess or leaking.

Still, given how tasty they are, it’s hardly a tall order to make sure you devour them in one go.

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