The Old City in Hyderabad has tales to tell from each nook and nook- and many of these are tasty tales that make you feel hungry immediately. Food right here oozes history, tradition, and hundreds of fats! Every store is at least 1/2- 1/2-century vintage and can have signboards fading out; however, the culinary delight is unrivaled. Hyderabad is synonymous with the Hyderabadi dum biryani. It is also well-known for its conventional cakes – from apricot candies to cucumber mithais; Hyderabad has loads to delight the candy enamel. And in case you are in Hyderabad, looking greater than just the biryani, Jouzi Halwa, a Turkish candy at the Hameedi Confectioners, is just what you want.
Contrary to the well-known Mozam Jahi marketplace, the store is tough to overlook. Hameedi neither has plush interiors nor fantastic neon signboards that welcome traffic from afar. The visitor’s bottleneck properly in front of the store, and the aroma wafting from Hameedi is enough for people to show their heads and snatch a plate of the Jouzi Halwa before the signal turns inexperienced! Jozi Halwa is a wealthy sweet dish, and though a serving might not look too massive, devouring the whole of its miles is a feat. Bright purple in coloration and crowned with cashew nuts and silver foil, Jouzi tastes like a richer variant of pavlova but sweeter and loads heavier.
As rich as the Jouzi Halwa is, the richer is its history, says Mohammed Anees, the existing proprietor of Hameedi Confectioners. The store is over 100 years old and was set up by an 11-12 months-antique Turkish boy who later became the favorite hallway of the final Nizam of Hyderabad, Mir Osman Ali Khan. I have misplaced the matter of how many years the store has existed.
My grandfather, Mohammad Hussain, found it while we were still young boys. He was of Turkish descent, and his father was a soldier in the Nizam’s navy. He passed away while his grandfather was just two years old. Since he became inside the army, his own family used to obtain a pension from the state, and his grandfather turned into the simplest child who had to fend for his mother,” Anees narrates.
With his father’s pension money, Hussain installed a small candy shop in front of the Mozam Jahi marketplace along with his friend, who turned a lot older and cooked dinners via profession. “Though he turned into most effective 11 years of age, he had the bodily constructed of a much older individual and all of the greater, changed into captivated with meals,” Hussain says. And consequently, Jouzi Halwa traveled all of Turkey’s manners to Hyderabad via Hussain, who brought the dish to the metropolis.
But the records don’t stop there. For a long time, Hussain’s store had no call. However, the enterprise became ripe due to the, without a doubt, tasty style of candies that Hussain served. Also, Hussain was one of the first confectioners who set up a shop in the heart of Nizam’s metropolis. Within no time, the flavor of Jouzi Halwa had traveled to all parts of Hyderabad. One day, Mir Osman Ali, passing by the store, stopped to have a plate of the plenty talked about halwa.
The Nizam cherished the sweet a lot that he named the store after his brother-in-law, Abdul Hamid, who became then the prince of Turkey,” Anees recounts. Jozi Halwa was often exported to Turkey for Abdul Hamid, who genuinely loved the sweet. Today, Jozi Halwa is shipped to almost all world components, no longer using the confectioners but with the aid of individuals who come to Hyderabad and wish to take back a reminiscence from the metropolis.
Ahmed says that nobody has managed to copy the dish they serve.
“Many of our workers had been poached by using other confectionery in the town. Many of them, who worked for years for Hameedi, areare in specific shops in one-of-a-kind components of the metropolis. But nobody makes the halwa as tasty as we do,” he claims. Almost a quintal of Jouzi Halwa is sold every day in the shop. What might also sound like an exaggeration is that it takes 16 hours to make one batch of the sweet—Jouz in Urdu method oats.
The key factor of the sweet is oat milk, which is blended with a lot of sugar, dry fruits, ghee, and zafran (saffron). The combination is then stirred for sixteen hours, with employees switching shifts every hour. The secret trace of spice makes the candy sincerely precise, which offers a special flavor to the dish. It tastes like a mixture of clove and cardamom, but Anees says it is nutmeg.
