Bunny Chow.
Durban Curry in a Hollowed Loaf
Bunny chow · say it: BUH-nee chow
Bunny chow is Durban's answer to takeaway: a quarter or half of an unsliced white loaf, its soft interior pulled out, refilled with a deep red mutton or bean curry, and topped with the crumb you removed. You eat it standing, tearing the lid into pieces and using them to scoop, working down through bread that has been soaking up curry gravy the whole time. The curry itself is properly Durban — chilli-hot, thickened with potato rather than cream, perfumed with cinnamon, star anise and curry leaves, and cooked long enough that the mutton slides off the bone. There is no rabbit in it and never was.
- Gate
- South AfricaDurban, KwaZulu-Natal
- Prep
- 25 min
- Cook
- 2 hr 10 min
- Total time
- 2 hr 35 min
- Serves
- 4
- Status
- Medium
- Nutrition / serving · estimated
- Calories 780 kcal
- Protein 42 g
- Carbs 78 g
- Fat 32 g
- Fiber 7 g
- Sugar 9 g
- Sodium 1250 mg
Why this recipe works.
- The curry is cooked on the bone for two hours, which is where the body of a real Durban gravy comes from — not from thickeners.
- Whole spices and ground masala are used at different stages, so the curry has both a top note and a base rather than one flat wall of heat.
- Clear instructions for hollowing the loaf so the walls hold gravy instead of collapsing halfway through eating.
- Includes the carrot sambal, which is not a garnish — the cold acid is what makes a whole quarter loaf of hot curry edible.
Ingredients.
22 itemsFor the bread
For the curry
For the sambal
Equipment
- Heavy-based pot with a lid
- Sharp bread knife
- Grater for the sambal
Instructions.
Start the whole spices
Heat the oil in a heavy pot over medium heat and drop in the cinnamon, star anise, cardamom and fennel seeds. Within 30 seconds they will swell slightly and the kitchen will smell sweet and woody — that is the signal to move on, before anything darkens.
Fry the onions hard
Add the onions and curry leaves and fry for 12–15 minutes, stirring often, until the onions collapse and turn a real golden brown at the edges. Stir in the garlic and ginger and cook two minutes more, until the paste stops smelling raw and starts sticking to the pot.
Tip The curry leaves will crackle and spit when they hit the oil. Stand back for the first few seconds and keep the lid within reach.
Cook out the masala
Stir in the masala and turmeric with a splash of water to stop them catching, then add the grated tomato. Cook for 8–10 minutes over medium heat until the mixture darkens to brick red, pulls away from the sides of the pot and you can see oil pooling around the edges.
Tip Oil separating out of the masala is the doneness signal. Stop before it and the curry tastes powdery all the way to the table.
Brown and braise the mutton
Add 900 g of mutton and turn it in the masala over high heat for 5 minutes until every piece is coated and sealed. Pour in the hot water and salt, bring to a simmer, cover and cook on low for 90 minutes, stirring every 20 minutes or so.
Add the potato
Drop in the halved potatoes, pushing them under the gravy, and simmer uncovered for another 30 minutes. The curry is ready when the mutton pulls off the bone under light pressure and the gravy coats a spoon thickly rather than running off it.
Tip If the gravy is still loose, lift the lid and boil hard for 5 minutes. Bread cannot hold a thin curry.
Make the sambal
While the curry finishes, toss the grated carrot with the green chilli, vinegar and a good pinch of salt. Leave it in the fridge for at least 15 minutes so the carrot softens slightly and takes on the acid.
Hollow the loaves
Cut the loaf into four equal blocks. Working from the cut face of each, pull out the soft crumb in one piece, leaving walls about 1.5 cm thick on the sides and base. Keep each removed crumb — it is the lid and the spoon.
Fill and serve immediately
Stir the coriander through the curry, then spoon it into each hollow until it sits proud of the rim, letting a little run down the sides. Balance the crumb lid on top, add a spoon of carrot sambal, and hand it over on paper. Eat with your hands.
Tips from our kitchen.
- Buy an unsliced, square white loaf and let it sit out for a few hours. A very fresh, soft loaf tears rather than hollows and turns to paste against the gravy.
- Cut the loaf into quarters through both directions, then hollow each block from the cut face, leaving a wall about 1.5 cm thick on all sides.
- Use mutton or lamb on the bone. Boneless cubes cook faster but the gravy stays thin and lacks the sticky body that comes off the bones.
- Fry the masala in oil until it darkens and the oil starts separating around the edges of the pan — this is the single step that separates a good Durban curry from a dusty one.
- Add the potato in the last 30 minutes only. Cooked from the start it disintegrates completely and turns the gravy into wallpaper paste.
- Fill the bread just before serving. A loaf loaded ten minutes early has already lost its structure at the bottom.
Substitutions.
- Durban masala → Hot curry powder plus 1 tsp extra chilli powder and 1 tsp ground coriander
- Durban masala is coarsely ground, heavy on chilli and coriander, and notably red. A standard hot curry powder gets you most of the way; add smoked or Kashmiri chilli for colour without extra fire.
- Mutton on the bone → Chicken thighs on the bone, or 2 tins of drained sugar beans
- Chicken needs only 40 minutes instead of two hours. The bean version is the original cheap bunny and is entirely traditional, not a modern vegetarian concession.
- Fresh curry leaves → Omit them entirely rather than using dried
- Dried curry leaves contribute almost nothing. The curry is still good without them; it simply loses one aromatic layer.
Variations.
- Bean bunny
- The cheapest and oldest version: sugar beans simmered in the same masala gravy with potato. Meat-free, and what most Durban shops sold before mutton bunnies became the tourist order.
- Kota
- Soweto's parallel invention — a quarter loaf filled with chips, polony, atchar, cheese and a fried egg instead of curry. Same bread architecture, entirely different city and filling.
- Prawn bunny
- A coastal Durban upgrade using large prawns added to the finished gravy for the last five minutes. Faster, richer, and priced accordingly on the beachfront.
Storage & reheating.
Keep the curry and the bread apart. The gravy refrigerates for 4 days and improves noticeably by day two as the masala settles; reheat it in a pot over low heat with a splash of water, since microwaving breaks the potato apart. It freezes well for 3 months without the potato — add freshly boiled potato when you reheat. A filled bunny does not keep at all: within an hour the bread walls give way and you are eating curry with a spoon like everyone else.
Serve with
Carrot sambal — coarsely grated carrot with green chilli, a little vinegar and salt — piled on top, and a cold drink you will need.
The story behind Bunny Chow.
Durban has the largest population of Indian descent of any city outside India, and it exists because of indenture. From 1860 the Natal colony imported labourers from Madras and Calcutta on five-year contracts to cut sugar cane, and traders — mostly Gujarati, arriving at their own expense and known as passenger Indians — followed. Both groups brought food with them, and over a century that food became something specifically Durban: a coarser, hotter masala than most Indian regional blends, curry leaves used freely, and gravies bulked with potato because potato was cheap and filling.
The hollowed loaf came later, and the honest answer about its origin is that nobody has produced a settled account. The best-supported explanation is a practical one about segregation: Indian workers and café owners in mid-twentieth-century Durban needed a way to carry and sell a hot meal to people who were not permitted to sit and eat where the food was made, and bread was the container that came to hand. The name is usually traced to bania, the Gujarati merchant caste — a bania chow, a trader's meal — which is plausible and widely repeated but not documented beyond the repetition. Other accounts point at golf caddies or cane cutters. They may all be partly true; food this ordinary rarely gets recorded when it starts.
What is not in dispute is the vocabulary. You order a quarter, a half or a full — a quarter for one person, a half if you are serious — and you specify mutton, bean, chicken or, in older shops, simply "beans" because that was the cheapest. It comes wrapped in paper with a small carrot-and-chilli salad on top, no fork, no plate. Eating it neatly is not possible and nobody in Durban has ever tried. The bread is not packaging that you discard: the piece at the bottom, saturated with gravy and slightly collapsed, is the reason the dish is built this way.
Questions, answered.
Why is it called bunny chow if there is no rabbit?
There has never been rabbit in it. The most commonly cited explanation is that "bunny" comes from bania, the Gujarati merchant caste who ran the Durban cafés that sold it, making it a trader's meal — but this is a widely repeated theory rather than a documented fact, and other origin stories exist. "Chow" is simply slang for food.
What kind of bread do I need?
An unsliced white sandwich loaf with a soft crumb and a thin, pale crust — the standard supermarket square loaf. Sourdough, ciabatta and rustic crusty breads are wrong for this: their open, chewy structure will not compress into gravy-soaked walls, and the thick crust fights you when you tear the lid.
How hot is a Durban curry supposed to be?
Genuinely hot. Durban cooking runs at a higher chilli level than most Indian regional cuisines, and a mutton bunny in the city will make a first-time eater sweat. This recipe is written at a firm medium — around two teaspoons of chilli in the masala — and you can push it up or down without changing anything else about the method.
How do you actually eat a bunny chow?
With your hands and no plate. Tear pieces off the crumb lid sitting on top, use them to scoop curry from the hollow, and once the lid is gone, start eating down through the bread walls. The bottom of the loaf, fully soaked in gravy, is eaten last and is the part people fight over.
Can I make the curry in advance?
Yes, and it is better if you do. Cook the mutton gravy a day ahead without the potato, refrigerate it overnight, then reheat it gently and add freshly boiled potato before filling the bread. The masala rounds out overnight and the harsh edge of the chilli softens into something deeper.
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Recipe by The DishRoute Kitchen · published August 20, 2026 · updated August 20, 2026