Classroom lesson 路 Dholl puri - Mauritius's favourite street food馃嚥馃嚭 Mauritius

Dholl puri - Mauritius's favourite street food

A soft flatbread filled with yellow split peas, eaten any time of day

A dholl puri flatbread rolled up with curry filling on a banana leaf

Photo 路 Wikimedia Commons

What is it?

Dholl puri is the most popular street food in Mauritius. It is a soft, thin flatbread made from flour and ground yellow split peas, filled with curry or chutney and rolled up. You can buy it at roadside stalls across the whole island for just a few rupees, any time of day.

Tell me more

The dough for dholl puri is made by mixing flour and cooked yellow split peas (called dholl) together, then rolling it out very thin on a hot flat pan. The cook keeps it moving quickly so it stays soft and flexible. Once it puffs up slightly, it is ready to be filled.

Inside the wrap goes a choice of fillings - usually a spoonful of bean curry called 'rougaille', some chutney, and perhaps a pickled vegetable called 'achard'. The whole thing is rolled up like a parcel and handed to you in a piece of paper. It is eaten standing up, walking, on the way to school, at the beach.

Dholl puri came to Mauritius with workers who came from India in the 1800s. They brought their food traditions with them, and over time those traditions mixed with Mauritian ingredients and other influences to create something entirely new. It is now considered one of the most Mauritian foods there is.

In the classroom

Walk your class through this in 15 minutes.

Talk together

Discussion prompts

  1. 01Dholl puri came from India but is now seen as totally Mauritian. How does food travel with people who move to new places?
  2. 02What is a food from your home that you think of as 'yours' even though it might originally come from somewhere else?
  3. 03Why might street food be especially important in a community - eaten outside, on the move, cheaply?
Try this

Classroom activity

Make a class 'food passport'. Each pupil finds out one food their family eats and traces where it originally came from. Put all the answers on a world map with lines showing how far each food travelled before arriving in your class. How mixed is your class's kitchen?