Guides · 4 min read ·
Karahi, Degchi, Tawa: The Pots and Pans of a Pakistani Kitchen
The essential Pakistani kitchen tools explained: karahi, degchi, tawa, patila, pressure cooker, belan and more. What each is for, what to buy first and how to care for them.
You don’t need a lot of equipment to cook Pakistani food well, but the few pieces you need are specific, and they shape how the food turns out. A karahi fries differently from a saucepan. A tawa gives roti the right spots. Here’s what’s in a typical Pakistani kitchen, what each tool does and which ones to buy first.
The karahi
A is a deep, round-bottomed pan with two handles, usually iron or steel, a bit like a heavy wok. It’s the pan for frying and for any dish that needs constant stirring: its sloped sides make it easy to keep the masala moving during , and its shape needs less oil for deep-frying than a flat pan.
It also gives its name to a whole style of cooking. Chicken karahi is cooked fast in one and traditionally served in the same pan, still sizzling.
What to buy: a heavy carbon steel or cast iron karahi about 30 cm across for a family. Non-stick versions exist and are easier to clean, but they don’t take the high heat a karahi is designed for.
The degchi
The is the everyday cooking pot: straight-sided, heavy-bottomed, usually aluminium or steel, with a fitted lid. Daal, salan, rice and biryani all happen here. The heavy base matters, because it spreads heat evenly and stops long-cooking dishes from catching.
Big gatherings use the deg, a huge version that can hold enough biryani for a hundred people. At home, two sizes are enough: a medium one for daal and salan, and a larger one for rice.
The tawa
A is a flat or slightly concave round griddle, traditionally iron. It’s used dry for roti, with a little ghee for parathas, and for tawa dishes like kaleji or kebabs. A good tawa gets very hot and holds that heat, which is what gives roti its brown spots and lets it puff.
Care: an iron tawa should never be scrubbed with soap and left wet. Wipe it, heat it dry and rub a few drops of oil over it before putting it away, as you would a cast iron pan.
The patila
A is a round metal pot. The small ones with a long handle are for boiling milk and making chai; larger ones boil rice and eggs. If your degchi is busy with the curry, the patila is where the rice for a biryani boils.
The pressure cooker
Almost every Pakistani household owns one. A pressure cooker turns 90 minutes of mutton into 25, and 2 hours of chickpeas into half an hour. It’s not essential for every recipe, but if you cook meat or dried beans regularly, it saves a great deal of time and gas. We have a separate guide on using a pressure cooker for Pakistani food.
For bread: the parat, chakla and belan
- Parat: a wide, shallow steel dish with raised edges, used for kneading dough. Any big bowl works, but a parat gives you room to knead properly.
- Chakla: a round wooden or marble board for rolling out roti.
- Belan: a thin rolling pin, narrower than the Western kind, which helps you roll roti evenly round.
A chimta, long flat tongs, lets you lift roti off the tawa and hold it over the open flame to puff it.
Smaller tools worth having
- Kafgir: a flat, perforated spoon for lifting fried food and turning sabzi without breaking it.
- Doi: a ladle for daal and salan.
- Hamam dasta (mortar and pestle): for crushing spices, ginger and garlic.
- A small tarka pan: a tiny pan with a handle, just for sizzling the for daal.
- A grater: for ginger, cucumber and carrots for gajar halwa.
What to buy first
If you’re setting up a kitchen to cook Pakistani food, you can make almost every recipe on this site with four things:
- A heavy karahi or wide, heavy frying pan
- A heavy-bottomed pot with a lid (degchi)
- A tawa or flat cast iron griddle
- A small saucepan for chai and boiling
A pressure cooker and a rolling pin come next. Everything else can wait until you find you need it.
Heavy is better
If there’s one rule across all of these, it’s to choose heavy over light. Thin, lightweight pans develop hot spots, so onions burn in one place and stay raw in another, and masalas catch on the bottom. A heavy base is more forgiving, and in Pakistani cooking, where so much depends on slow frying and long simmering, that matters more than any other feature.
