Jain Pav Bhaji is Mumbai's griddled vegetable mash and buttered roll, rebuilt for Jain diners by removing onion, garlic, and root vegetables and standing in raw banana where the potato would be. Standard pav bhaji leans hard on potato for body and on onion and garlic for its savory base, so the Jain version is a real reformulation rather than a simple omission: it has to find weight and depth somewhere else while keeping the dish recognizably itself. Done right, it still eats like pav bhaji, a rich, spiced, butter-glossed mash mopped with soft bread, just built from a different vegetable set.
The make is the familiar tawa method with the substitutions doing the work. Raw banana is boiled and mashed to supply the starchy body potato normally gives, alongside cooked cauliflower, peas, capsicum, and tomato. The mash is cooked down on a hot griddle with tomato and a generous amount of pav bhaji masala, leaned on more heavily here since there is no onion-garlic base, and finished with butter mashed through it. The pav is slit and toasted cut-side down in butter on the same tawa until golden, then served with the bhaji, more butter, lemon, and chopped coriander. Good execution gets the raw banana smooth and unobtrusive so it reads as body rather than as banana, drives the savory depth through masala and a long enough griddle cook, and toasts the pav properly crisp at the edges. Sloppy versions taste flat and hollow without the allium base, let the banana come through with an off sweetness, serve a thin underspiced bhaji that never cooked down, or pair it with a pale, untoasted pav that just goes soggy in the mash.
Variations stay inside the Jain constraints while chasing richness. A heavier masala and extra tomato push the depth and tang up to cover the missing base; more butter takes it toward the indulgent end Mumbai stalls are known for. Some cooks blend in extra cauliflower for body instead of relying on banana alone, tuning texture while staying root-free. The standard onion-garlic-potato pav bhaji it descends from is its own dish and deserves its own article rather than being crowded in here.