18/05/2021
The kitchen of the Puri Jagannath Temple feeds 100,000 people every day and is the largest open-air kitchen in the world. I have never missed taking a tour of the kitchen in the countless number of times that I have been there and neither should you. Your mind will be blown to see the scale of the operations here. Every task has a few men designated to it. Some men draw water from the well, some are in charge of cutting vegetables, some are in charge of cutting wood and some are in charge of cooking. The food is prepared using only clay pots; 15,000 clay pots are used every day and none of those is reused ever again. The food is prepared employing a unique technique. Seven clay pots are arranged one over another, secured with jute ropes, and the whole setup is then placed on the firewood. Every time, the items in the uppermost pot get cooked first and the order remains the same till the lowermost pot.
Every day, 56 items are cooked and offered to Lord Jagannath as Prasad (devotional food offering) after which it becomes the Mahaprasad (the blessed food). Then, at around 2-3 PM, the visitors and devotees get to buy the Mahaprasad at a place calledAnanda Bazaar inside the complex. The Mahaprasad is scrumptious and not a morsel of it gets wasted on any given day.
