The Old City in Hyderabad has tales to tell from each nook and nook- and many of these are appetizing tales, stories that make you feel hungry right away. Food right here oozes history, tradition, and hundreds of fats! Every store is at least 1/2- a-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.
Situated contrary to the well-known Mozam Jahi marketplace, the store is tough to overlook. Hameedi neither has plush interiors nor the fantastic neon signboards that welcome traffic from far. The visitor’s bottleneck proper 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 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 vintage and became set up by way of an 11-12 months-antique Turkish boy who later went to turn out to be the favorite hallway of the final Nizam of Hyderabad, Mir Osman Ali Khan. I even have misplaced matter of how many years the store has been in existence now.
It becomes found through my grandfather, Mohammad Hussain, while we were still young boys. He changed into Turkish descent, and his father was a soldier in the Nizam’s navy, and he passed away while grandfather became just two years antique. Since he becomes inside the army, the 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 the money that came from his father’s pension, Hussain installation a small candy shop in front of the Mozam Jahi marketplace along with his friend, who turned into an awful lot older in age and a cook dinner 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 becomes ripe due to the, without a doubt, tasty style of candies that Hussain served. Also, Hussain was one of the first few confectioners who set up a shop in the heart of the Nizam’s metropolis. Within no time, the flavor of Jouzi Halwa had traveled to all parts of Hyderabad. One day, Mir Osman Ali, who was passing by way of 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 then was often exported to Turkey for Abdul Hamid, who fell genuinely in love with the sweet. Today, Jozi Halwa is exported to almost all world components, no longer using the confectioners, but with the aid of individuals who come to Hyderabad and wish to take lower back a reminiscence from the metropolis.
Ahmed says that nobody has managed to copy the dish that they serve but.
“A lot of our workers had been poached by using other confectionery in the town. Many of them, who worked for years for Hameedi, is actually in one-of-a-kind components of the metropolis, in specific shops. 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 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 into a lot of sugar, dry fruits, ghee, and zafran (saffron). The combination is then stirred for sixteen hours, employees switching shifts every hour. What makes the candy sincerely precise is the secret trace of spice, which offers a special flavor to the dish. It tastes like a mixture of clove and cardamom, but Anees says that it is nutmeg.
