Balti (food)

A balti or bāltī gosht (Urdu: بالٹی گوشت, Hindi: बाल्टी गोश्त) is a type of curry within the United Kingdom served in a thin, pressed-steel wok called a balti bowl. Balti curries are cooked quickly using vegetable oil rather than ghee, over high heat in the manner of a stir-fry, and any meat is used off the bone. Balti sauce is based on garlic and onions, with spices including turmeric and garam masala. The dish was developed in Birmingham, England in the 1970s. A region of Birmingham with many balti restaurants has become known as the Balti Triangle. An application was made to the European Union to make "Birmingham Balti" a traditional speciality guaranteed product; the application failed because the allowed variations were not precisely defined.

. Adil's restaurant in Stoney Lane, Sparkbrook, a district of Birmingham, founded in 1977, called itself "the home of Balti Cuisine", stating that its dishes followed the traditions of Northern Kashmir. However, the Canadian food writer Colleen Taylor Sen states that balti's origins are unclear, as the food eaten in Baltistan "bears no resemblance" to balti curry.

Sen suggests instead that the name of the food may have originated from the fact that it is cooked in a pot named a baltī, similar to a karahi. The word "balti" is the Hindi for "bucket", from the Portuguese balde of the same meaning. It is claimed that the thin steel balti wok was, like the curry, invented and manufactured in Birmingham in the 1970s, differing from traditional heavy cast iron cooking pots.

However, some balti restaurateurs of Birmingham have claimed that they invented the dish to please their white British clientele. The British-Pakistani scholar of culture Ziauddin Sardar describes the invention as a triumph of marketing, making balti houses seem more authentic than "the bog-standard confines of curry and vindaloo ". Sardar comments that he personally cannot tell balti from other curries. The scholar of food Parama Roy, citing Sardar, adds that the success of the marketing effort "is evidenced by the publication of the Balti Bible by Pat Chapman". The historian of food Lizzie Collingham and the Oxford English Dictionary concur that Pakistani restaurateurs invented balti in Birmingham. In 2014, the Indian cook Madhur Jaffrey described the balti style of cooking as a "craze with no authentic origins which will slowly die as people's tastes turn to more complex dishes".