Harmandir Sahib/ Golden Temple in Punjab: Cuisine

Select Language Afrikaans Albanian Arabic Armenian Azerbaijani Basque Belarusian Bulgarian Bengali Catalan Chinese (Simplified) Chinese (Traditional) Croatian Czech Danish Dutch English Estonian Filipino Finnish French Galician Georgian German Greek Gujarati Haitian Creole Hebrew Hindi Hungarian Icelandic Indonesian Irish Italian Japanese Javanese Kannada Khmer Korean Latvian Lithuanian Macedonian Malay Maltese Marathi Nepali Norwegian Persian Polish Portuguese Punjabi Romanian Russian Serbian Slovak Slovenian Spanish Swahili Swedish Tamil Telugu Thai Turkish Ukrainian Urdu Vietnamese Welsh Yiddish

This is a collection of articles archived for the excellence of their content. You can help by converting these articles into an encyclopaedia-style entry, deleting portions of the kind normally not used in encyclopaedia entries. Please also fill in missing details; put categories, headings and sub-headings; and combine this with other articles on exactly the same subject. Readers will be able to edit existing articles and post new articles directly on their online archival encyclopædia only after its formal launch. See examples and a tutorial.

Golden Temple in Punjab: Cuisine

The Times of India

Harmandir Sahib or Darbar Sahib, famously known as the Golden Temple, is one of the best-known Gurdwaras of the country. This Gurdwara is not only filled with the purity and serenity of gurbani recital but also with the people waiting for ‘Guru Ram Das Langar’ after the prayers. Open 24 hours, 365 days, this langar (a term used in a Gurdwara for serving food to the devotees) is named after the fourth guru of the Sikh community and welcomes everybody without any discrimination based on cast, creed or religion.

The people who cook and serve the food here are not expert chefs, but volunteers who want only blessings in return. The Gurdwara has a team for everything, such as a team of men in saffron turbans dragging the wheat sacks and hundreds of women rolling chapattis (flatbreads). There are groups of people for washing plates – a cleaning team. They clean up after almost 70,000 people every single day.

The women in the kitchen roll chapattis and the men toss them onto big, flat hotplates, flipping them using long, hooked rods. Another group picks the baskets of cooked chapattis and run out to the eating area to serve. A few people stir the dal (lentils) and vegetables in big handis (pots). Apart from dal and chapattis, volunteers also serve rice, vegetables and one milky sweet. The food is not complete without a cup of tea, which is served at the end of meal. There is no fixed time for lunch and dinner as the langar is open all the time and for everyone – from beggars to the richest of rich – who eat, pray and learn to live together.