The burji (or burjee) is a Bombay streetside dish. If you want to gentrify it, the way all these hoity-toity chefs of pretentious five-star hotels do, please don’t talk to me or read this site.
The burji, like misal pao, is for the grassroot level hungry person. It is totally unpretentious, like a lot of dhaba food in Punjab and Chinese food in small stalls in China. The burji was designed to feed hunger, not get written about on Instagram.
The burji is the only egg dish which is cooked from beginning to end on high heat. It’s also a dish which, like many other grassroot level hungry dishes, combines less expensive ingredients with expensive ingredients, and adds strong taste, to make a small amount of money stretch a long way. Here, the expensive ingredient, of course, is the eggs. The inexpensive ingredients are the onions and tomatoes. And the strong taste is the green chilly, the optional red chilly powder, and the dhania patta.
A photo of egg burji looks similar to akuri, till you learn to cook them and learn to notice the difference. Both the akuri and the burji have spices, but the akuri is sophisticated, mellowed, and smoothened, while the burji is rustic. The akuri is ruined if it’s over-cooked or fried on high heat, while the burji is not cooked properly till it’s fried on high heat and moisture is removed.