GOLDEN TEMPLE AMRITSAR.
This is the largest free kitchen in the world. Open 24 hours year-round, this food hall feeds 100,000people for free of charge every day. And on religious holidays, that number can double. Just one of those huge bowls is enough to feed around 10,000 people.
The food is liberal to anyone no matter religion, gender, or ethnicity. Narrator: Community kitchens, or langar, have been popular across South Asia since the birth of Sikhism. And the langar at the Golden Temple has been serving meals to all loved people since 1577.
Each dish is cooked in giant metal vats. Over 100 gas cylinder sand, huge piles of wood are burned through every day to keep things running 24/7. And there's only one short 30-minute break in the cooking, from 4:30 to 5 a.m. Thousands of vegetables have to be peeled and prepared by volunteers before they're taken to be cooked. And while the menu can vary depending on availability or the donated vegetables that the kitchen may receive, it is always vegetarian.
But keeping this many of us fed takes tons of ingredients. Narrator: If you've never heard the term "quintal" before, it's 100 kilograms. So that's a total of 2,000 kilos, or 2 tonnes, of dal per day. Narrator: That's over 375 kilos of onions and 100 kilos of spices every 24 hours, only for the dal. To make it, Chana dal, or split chickpeas, and urad dal, or black lentils, are mixed and repeatedly washed. They're then moved into even larger vats and mixed with the onions, spices, salt, and ghee, a clarified butter, and cooked together. The kitchen spends over$5,000 a day on ghee alone.
And it's not just the dal. Each day, the kitchen offers the lentils, a vegetable dish, bread, kheer, rice, pickle, water, and tea. Kheer is a sweet pudding made of rice, milk, sugar, and almonds boiled together. But one of the biggest demands on the kitchen is bread. Unlike the huge vats that can be made in bulk, each chapati needs to be rolled out separately before cooking. Once rolled, each one is hand coated in ghee to feature flavor and keep it from drying out. To keep up with demand, the work is split between machines and people cooking by hand. Producing the bread alone takes 10 tonnes of flour a day. [machines buzzing] Narrator: And to keep this operation running smoothly, it takes a lot of volunteers. Narrator: This selfless service is an important part of Sikhism. Seawards, or religious volunteers, are key to keeping this operation running daily.
From peeling and chopping vegetables and even donating food to serving and cleaning, almost everything is volunteer-run. Narrator: Using metal trays keeps waste to a minimum, but it makes a lot of noise. [metal plates clanging] The scale of the kitchen has been constantly expanding to accommodate more and more visitors each year. 20 years ago, the kitchen will consume 3,500 kilos of flour per day. But now that number has tripled. It now costs over $4 million a year to stay the kitchen running. But with a constant stream of donations and support, the langar has kept up with demand no matter the number of visitors.
If you liked "Big Batches," please subscribe. It's the best way to let us know that you want more of the series. And if you want more from me, please check out my show, "Regional Eats." We have five machines here, The number of devotees may increase further in the coming years. Sach Khand Sri Harmandir Sahib, Sri Durbar Sahib, Sri Amritsar in Punjab receive one-and-a-half to two lakh devotees daily, and almost all of the devotees enjoy the langar at Sri Guru Ramdas Langar. We have about 400 employees working in Langar Hall, and thousands of devotees also offer their services here. There is no limit to the number of pilgrims, Every devotee always gets to eat the langar, be it in the day or at night.
image credit:
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Plates_for_langar_at_Golden_Temple,_Amritsar.jpg
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