Lisa Reisman Photos
“Baking is unforgiving,” said Bryan Burke as he poured flour from an industrial-sized bag into a container on a commercial scale at Sherkaan, the restaurant in the alley across from Yale Bookstore.
It was 8:15 a.m. on a recent weekday in the cold, brightly lit basement kitchen. Burke, Sherkaan’s chef, was making dough for the Indian street food eatery’s newly introduced pizzas, including one featuring butter chicken, otherwise known as Oye Makhna.
Sherkaan, owned by Ankit Harpaldas, opened at the former location of Thali Too in April 2019.
Take-out and delivery orders will prove crucial to the ability of local restaurants like Sherkaan to weather the pandemic during the coming months as Covid-19 cases climb and cold weather sets in. Call (203) 405‑5808 or visit the website to order Oye Makhna or other dishes for take-out or delivery from Sherkaan, which is at 65 Broadway. Hours are 11 a.m.-10 p.m. Mondays through Thursdays; 11 a.m. to 9 p.m. Sundays.
While short-order cooking can be off the cuff, “with baking you have to be really precise,” Burke, 29, said as he consulted an Excel spreadsheet that enables him to account for differences in batch sizes when fine-tuning a recipe.
An additional challenge in Burke’s kitchen: putting a new twist on pies in a city that bills itself the pizza capital of the world, where loyalties run deep and divisions abound over matters like crust size and tanginess of sauce.
“People defend their favorites to the death,” Burke noted.
All that said, he does have experience on his side. A week after he got his driver’s license, he took a job delivering pizza at Pizzeria Pomodoro (since closed) in his hometown of Farmington. Between deliveries, he’d wash dishes. He was 16 at the time.
“I got sucked into the industry from there,” said Burke (pictured). “One day, someone calls out, ‘Bryan, you’re going to learn how to make salad,’ and then it was onto making dough and learning how to stretch pizza.”
It wasn’t just the world of the kitchen, which he called “the ultimate refuge for misfits,” that caught his imagination. It was cooking itself. “I was like ‘what’s this? I want to try it,’” he said. “I wanted to know everything.”
On one day off — after working 10 days straight — he went to a new Asian market that he’d been passing on the way to work “just to see what kind of ingredients they have. It was a kind of hunger to learn what I didn’t know,” he recalled. On another, he offered to work a shift for free with his friend, “just to see what they were doing.”
He paused to add dry malt flour to the dough. “This is a cool, lesser-known baker’s secret,” he said, one he picked up reading a pizza forum. “The grain gets sprouted and dried out, so it contains the enzymes that help break down the starches, so the final product will have a higher sugar content for better browning on the crust.”
“I had so much weird nostalgia starting out this latest pizza project, because at a certain point I deliberately tried to distance myself from pizza to be a more serious cook,” Burke said, as he carried the basketball-sized sphere of dough up the steps and into the main kitchen. “But [owner] Ankit [Harpaldas] took a chance on me when he started this restaurant, and it’s definitely worked out.”
Burke was in his third year as head chef at Harpaldas’ Taprock Beer Bar in Farmington when Harpaldas told him about his concept for a new Indian restaurant. It would depart from the British-inspired Indian dishes like vindaloo and tikka masala and concentrate on India’s “street eats.”
“The whole idea of this place is to disrupt people’s idea of a traditional Indian restaurant — the white tablecloths, the thick menus, the all-you-can-eat buffets,” Harpaldas told me later. The interior design, which includes a mural of Indian passengers boarding a train along one wall and rows of bikes suspended from the ceiling is intended, he said, “to evoke the feeling of walking down a street in India.”
Same goes for the food.
“We want to breathe new life into our country’s diverse and flavorful cuisine,” he said. Hence, the street eats featuring Frankie rolls, or wraps made with paratha, or Indian flatbread; chaat dogs, a playful twist on a hot dog, with a vegetable or lamb seekh kebab tucked into a split-top roll; and okra fries.
When it came to finding a chef, Burke sprang to mind. “Bryan is an unbelievably talented and imaginative cook, and super-passionate about learning whatever and wherever he can,” Harpaldas said. “He just had to get some on-the-ground training.”
That meant a stint for a few months at Hartford’s Dhaba Wala Indian Kitchen, which is owned by Harpaldas’ father Paul. (Paul Harpaldas also owned New Haven’s Royal India, formerly on Howe Street.)
“It literally translates to ‘hole in the wall,’” Burke, said as he divided the dough into squares, weighing them each out to 12 ½ ounces. “It’s a tiny little restaurant where they do take-out.”
Harpaldas’ mother and grandmother-in-law also pitched in, inviting him into their homes and letting him cook with them.
“They were a lot of fun, but they don’t mess around,” Burke said, as he folded each side of the dough and cupped it with his hands into balls. “So many things are so labor-intensive. Like curry shells. They’re these little puff balls that you roll out into little half-dollar-sized discs of dough, and then fry one by one, and then a half hour later, you have one appetizer for one person.
“It’s a labor of love, but there’s so much prep in a kitchen with a menu like this, so much behind the scenes.”
The challenge, Burke said, as he moved with the tray of dough balls into the alcove housing the clay oven known as a tandoor, is to make food on the menu accessible to different palates.
“I know plenty of people who haven’t had butter chicken, but I don’t know many people who haven’t had pizza before,” he said. “So the idea is to introduce them to that flavor, whether it’s butter chicken or palak paneer, and to have them asking what’s the sauce on this, and getting them comfortable with that taste.”
With that, he pressed down on a ball of dough. Using the tips of his fingers, he made a full rotation around the rim, his pizza tattoo making a cameo appearance.
“I think that’s been one of my big motivations, coaxing people into trying food that they normally would never consider,” he said, as he flattened the pie onto the pan. At Taprock, “you could get a burger but you could also order a burger with demi-glace, and so this person who didn’t know what a demi-glace was now has that experience. I call it nuanced low brow.”
“We use the same sauce that we use for our butter chicken entree,” Burke said, ladling the rich, yellow-ochre-colored sauce onto the pie. “Most places would use straight oregano. I do a blend of oregano and fenugreek.”
After sprinkling the pie with pecorino romano, a hard, salty Italian cheese, he studded it with pieces of chicken, and added Bacio low-moisture, whole milk mozzarella. (It was chicken thigh, not breast meat, he said, and halal certified.)
“This is chicken we cooked in the tandoor oven,” he said. “We use a yogurt marinade that has Indian-style yogurt and Greek yogurt, and ginger garlic paste, green chilis, and then the spices, turmeric, coriander, cumin, and the list goes on, and we marinate it usually overnight.”
He paused before sliding the pie into the oven. “I feel like I’ve been introduced to a whole new culture,” he said. “The more I learn, the more I realize I don’t know. It’s amazing.”
Twelve minutes later, Burke slid the pizza out of the oven. A heady aroma wafted through the kitchen. He studied it, then shook his head.
“I’m going to take it out of the pan and pop it back in for just a second since the top cooked a little quicker than the bottom,” he said. A few minutes later, he was drizzling the pie with yogurt and topping it with fresh cilantro.
Reader, the pizza did not disappoint. The chicken was tender and aromatic, the sauce rich and savory, and the seasoning zesty. True to Harpaldas’ word, it conjured a sense of ambling down a street in some city in India. As for the crust, it was thin, closer to Pepe’s than Modern.
“Ankit and I have been talking about this for a while and then around New Year’s Eve, we finally did it,” Burke said. “Our takeout business has stayed pretty strong, but pizza during the pandemic has just exploded.
“This is our pandemic baby.”
Previous coverage of recommended take-orders to help keep local businesses survive the pandemic:
• Today’s Special: Haci’s Napoletana Pie
• Today’s Special: Fred & Patty’s Brie On Baguette
• Today’s Special: Nieda’s Moist Falafel
• Today’s Special: Qulen’s Vegan “Wings”
• Today’s Special: Aaron’s Peruvian Rice Bowl
• Today’s Special: Singh Bros.’ Chana Kulcha
• Today’s Special: Grandma’s Chicken Soup
• Today’s Special: Woody’s Steak & Shrimp
• Today’s Special: Shilmat’s Yemisir Sambusa
• Today’s Special: Arjun’s Vegetarian Manchurian
• Today’s Special: Mohammed’s Bhel Poori
• Today’s Special: Francesco’s Tortelli
• Today’s Special: Seikichi’s Sushi
• Today’s Special: Ketkeo’s Khao Poon
• Today’s Special: Mike Fox’s French Toast
• Today’s Special: Zhang’s Squirrel Fish Dish
• Today’s Special: Jessica’s Gumbo
• Today’s Special: Kenny Kim’s Vegan Ramen
• Today’s Special: Ernesto’s Venezuelan Arepa
• Today’s Special: Corey’s “Prison Reformer” Frank
