Close-up of the giant kitchen serving 100,000 people a day

The world’s largest community kitchen supplies 100,000 a day at the Golden Temple, India.
Harmandir Sahib, commonly known as the Golden Temple, is the largest Sikh temple in the world. Inside, a huge Langar kitchen was built, which has served meals since 1577.

Harmandir Sahib . Golden Temple It is estimated that, currently, the cost of a year to maintain the kitchen operation for a year is about more than 4 million USD. This is the largest free kitchen in the world, open to anyone, regardless of religion, gender or ethnicity. Open 24 hours year round, serving 100,000 people free of charge per day. On religious holidays that number can double. Huge pans for cooking. Dishes cooked in giant metal pans. The cooks use over a hundred gas cylinders and giant blocks of wood to burn each day, keeping things running 24/7. The kitchen only stops cooking for about 30 short minutes for a break from 4:30 to 5 am. Every day, volunteers peel and prepare thousands of kilograms of vegetables before cooking. The menu changes, depending on the vegetables available or donated, but the menu is always vegetarian. The kitchen uses a huge amount of ingredients every day. That is more than 375 kg of onions and 100 kg of spices just for the traditional dal dish. The kitchen spends more than $5,000 a day on ghee alone. Close-up of the giant kitchen serving 100,000 people a day One of the biggest challenges facing the kitchen is chapati bread. Unlike giant vats that make batches of cakes, each chapati must be rolled individually before cooking. Then, when it’s cooked, the chef coats the cake by hand with butter to add flavor and keep it from drying out. To meet demand, the job of baking is split between machines and hand-made humans. Bread production alone consumes 10 tons of flour per day. The kitchen scale is constantly expanding to accommodate the increasing number of guests each year. 20 years ago, the kitchen used only 3,500 kg of flour per day, but now that number has almost tripled. Sewadars, the local word for active volunteers, forgets themselves here. They are key to keeping the public kitchen running on a daily basis. From peeling and slicing vegetables, cleaning ingredients, even donating food, to serving and cleaning up, almost everything is done by volunteers. The kitchen uses metal trays for cleanliness but makes a lot of noise.