Travelling to India as a Vegan
We all love to travel & whist being vegan at home can be a challenge, when travelig it can be that little bit more, but with some planning you can make it an amazing experience!
Recently I was lucky enough to go to India with my mum , where a lot of her family still family live.
As i travelled i quickly started climatise to not only the heat (it was 36c in October!) but also authentic Indian food. I’ve cousins who are farmers so we ate with the freshest of ingredients and you can DEFINITELY tell the difference!
I also felt more connected to Mother Earth as I saw the rice fields and how food was being harvested, it was so lovely connected at this basic level with food!
One of the biggest challenges is trying to get food that doesn’t have any ghee in it (ghee is purified butter).
I was lucky enough to stay with family and they catered for me so they cooked using vegetable oil instead of ghee & cooked tofu for the very forst time so we were all experiencing new foods!
One of the biggest challenges is Ghee. India is predominatley vegetarian using a lot of dairy. Ghee (purified butter) is the biggest challeng as it’s in almost everytinhg!
Things that don’t have ghee in them as a rule are often either fried or fresh raw meals, cooked vegetables and lentils often have ghee, as do most indian breads such as parathas, if you ask they maybe able to cook your meal without ghee or use oil but this does depend of your time to wait & if they can cater for it, I was a novelty amongst my family, ha!
What we deam as authentic Indian food is very different to what is actually authentic in India & depending on what areas of India you go to, would dictatate what local specialities you can try.
For example when we went to Amritar (A holy city for Sikhs) to visit the Golden Temple we tried some local favourites called Kulcha they were so good! A lovely savoury street food (Note this will probably have some ghee if you don’t ask for a vegan version). You could always use your HappyCow App to try and see if you can get a vegan version! Let us know if you’d like us to make a Rootyfuel version :).
You can get lots of yummy sweet treats! My favourite was Jalebi, especially when you get them fresh & hot! Totally Vegan too so you can enjoy guilt free! So yummy and a little addicitive (must be the sugar!).
And finally I found so interesting fruits, dragon fruitanyone? It’s always worth trying something new, I even tried green oranges and the flavour of the juice was truly refreshing! What I loved was that the juice is extracted using cold pressed methods, keeping more of the nutrients in, absolutely yummy!
My blog won’t have don’t my journey justice, i would urge you to explore India and try all the flavours this magnificent Country has to offer!
