Blog - Explore Real India

By Explore Real India | Spice guide | 7 min read Green cardamom (elaichi) is sweet, floral and bright. Black cardamom (badi elaichi) is smoky, resinous and bold. They come from different plants, they taste nothing alike, and Indian cooks don’t swap one for the other. Many visitors find this out in a spice shop […]

Every year someone emails us three days before a flight to Delhi, panicking about a list of eleven vaccines they found on a random forum. The honest answer is calmer than that. India does not require any vaccination for entry if you are arriving directly from most countries, but there are a handful of shots […]

Delhi Street Art Tour Most first time visitors to Delhi never realise the city has a proper open air art scene until someone points them toward a wall in Lodhi Colony or a lane in Shahpur Jat. There is no single street art district here. Instead there are several, each with its own character, its […]

North Indian vs South Indian Cooking Ask ten people in Delhi what “Indian food” means and you will get ten different answers, most of them wrong in some small way. That is because India does not really have one cuisine. It has dozens, and the split between North Indian and South Indian cooking is the […]

Delhi has quietly become one of the easiest cities in India to learn real home style cooking, and the classes here range from quick two hour chai sessions to full day market to table experiences. If you are trying to work out which one is actually worth your time, the answer depends less on price […]

Most people who write to us before their first trip to India ask some version of the same question: where do I even start? There’s a lot of noise online, half of it outdated, half of it written by people who spent four days in the country and decided they understood it. This guide is […]

Essential Indian Spices Every Home Cook Needs Walk into any Indian kitchen and you will notice something quickly. There is no single “curry powder” doing all the work. What looks like one flavor to an outsider is actually a small, deliberate system of spices, each doing a specific job. If you are trying to cook […]

Ask ten Indian households how they make chai and you will get ten slightly different answers. Someone’s grandmother swears by extra cardamom. Someone’s uncle insists the milk goes in first, always. There is no single official recipe, but there is a shared logic to it, and once you understand that logic, you can make chai […]

Which Is the Best Indian Street Food? A Local’s Honest Ranking Ask ten Indians what the best street food is and you will get ten different answers, usually argued with real conviction. There is no single winner here, but there are a handful of dishes that show up again and again on every list, in […]

If you spend even a day in New Delhi, chances are someone will tell you to see India Gate at least once, and honestly, they’re not wrong. It’s one of those monuments that manages to be both a national war memorial and a place where families spread out picnic blankets on a Sunday evening. That […]