Samosa Summarum

Ah, the humble samosa. A deep fried/baked pastry packet of veg and/or meat and/or dried fruit from India/Turkey/North Africa/East Africa/Portugal/Persia (thank you Wikipedia). My personal experience with them comes from the (mainly Kurdish or Turkish owned) greengrocer shops of Copenhagen which often sell them from greasy trays perched on top of the counter. I prefer the veggie ones filled with a spicy potato and pea mixture as my logic gland tells me there ought to be fewer life threatening diseases in slowly deteriorating vegetables than meat. And I think they actually taste better. Win win.

After setting myself the task of creating my own version I hit my first stumbling block – pastry. Life is too short to make it. Thankfully our local Vietnamese “supermarket” has packets of wafer thin frozen spring roll pastry which I quickly deemed perfect for the job. Then it was simply a case following a meandering path between recipes gleaned from various intaweb and bookish sources and my own intuition-cum-imagination. And the result was fab. And terribly cheap. I used small waxy potatoes despite many recipes calling for floury ones and I thought they were fantastic. They retain a more robust consistency, thinks moi.

Samosas

(makes roughly twenty – any leftover filling can be used to make a mean veggie curry)

Frozen spring roll pastry – 40 sheets thawed
1 kg spuds peeled and diced pretty finely
2 large onions chopped
A few cloves of garlic chopped
250 g frozen peas thawed and drained
1 teaspoon cumin seeds
1 teaspoon coriander seeds
1 teaspoon black pepper corns
1 teaspoon fenugreek seeds
2 teaspoons tumeric
2-4 chillis chopped
a handful of chopped fresh coriander
3 teaspoons yellow mustard seeds
salt
vegetable oil
flour & water paste
water

Start by roasting off your cumin, coriander, pepper and fenugreek seeds in a large frying or sautéing pan and bunging them into a mortar for some pestling. Then soften the onions and garlic in a little oil, add the potato, chillis, mustard seeds, tumeric, some salt and about three quarters of the spice mix as well as about half a cup of water. Mix up well, cover and cook over a medium heat for five minutes. Then remove the lid and cook until the potatoes are soft and the liquid is almost boiled away, turning over the mixture continuously to prevent burning. Taste to see if you need more salt or spices. When fully cooked add the peas and fresh coriander.

You now let the mixture cool, a fine time to fill up you now empty wine glass. Then you can make your flour and water glue.

I now have to reveal the second of my stumbling blocks – how to make my samosas geometrically correct. Which I never really did but after ten or so I managed to get them looking sort of ok. I ended up having two rather longish corners which I folded back creating something which looked a bit like a trussed chicken. After deep frying until golden brown they looked like roasted trussed chickens. So to assemble the beasts you peel off two sheets from the masses and fold them over creating a triangle. Then place a goodish dollop of mixture somewhere to one side of the middle of this, smear some flour glue along two edges and fold, pushing out as much air as poss. You then fold the edges back on themselves again and crimp.

I would imagine a healthier option would be to bake your samosas, maybe brush them with a little oil or butter to make ‘em shiny. But I wanted the artery clogging version so into a pan of 180 degrees c groundnut oil they were plopped, one at a time (only had a small amount of oil) until the roast chicken appearance was obtained. They were then drained on a rack.

If not eaten immediately these go a bit soft, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing. My idea was to freeze most of my batch but they were so popular among the B’s (Mr, Mrs & Miss) that they disappeared quicker than a botty burp in a wind tunnel.