If you’re not familiar with Indian cuisine, samosas are these delicious deep fried pastries filled with veggies, lamb, pork or whathaveyou. I order Indian food a lot for work and try to snag one of these for myself before I feed the rest of the lot. What can I say, I’m a little a selfish.
When I saw THIS recipe for homemade ones, I thought I would give it a try. Now I am not a “from scratch” kind of girl. My thinking is, if they already made pie crusts, pasta and bread so readily and cheaply available, why should I bother making it?
But when the only substitute for the dough for this recipe would have been phyllo dough, I just knew it wouldn’t get the texture I wanted. Also this dough was easy, just flour and water, no yeast involved. So I thought I’d give it a go.
And just a warning, this isn’t step-by-step as much of this process was too messy for me to juggle a camera at the same time.
I started out by mixing up the dough and letting it sit wrapped up while the potatoes boiled and the peas defrosted.
Once the potatoes were nice and soft (about a half hour), I removed the potatoes and boiled the cauliflower for 4-5 minutes. Then I cut them both up into tiny cubes/florets and added them to my bowl.
You want to cut everything up small because your going to have to stuff your samosas and the smaller, the better.
I used my trusty wok to sauté the shallots, potatoes, cauliflower and peas. Then I added the cilantro and curry powder to get this tasty contraption.
Then comes the part that I almost wanted to quit on. I separated the dough and rolled it out individually but I had a really difficult time stuffing the samosas without tearing the dough. And if you’re going to deep fry something, trust me, you do not want tears.
The recipe tells you to hold it like a cone which DID NOT work. It was three times easier to just spoon the potato/cauliflower mixture on one-half of the half-circle dough and then wet the seams, encase the mixture, and close with a fork.
Also I didn’t have any wax paper and my first solution of using aluminum foil did not work, the dough just stuck and ruined some of the samosas. The floured pan seemed to work better but the sticky dough situation was really, really frustrating me.
But I was able to salvage all but perhaps two and the deep frying was super easy. Once they are all fried up, you are ready to eat!
I highly suggest serving with mango chutney! Though it sucked at times these were truly delicious!
I still stick to the fact that the phyllo dough would not have yield the results I wanted. But will I be making this recipe again soon…likely not. Nor any other dough for that matter.
Also I was able to use the left over potato/cauliflower mixture for a tasty brinner – just add an egg and you have a tasty curry hashbrown with cauliflower and fried egg. I think that needs to be on a brunch menu somewhere.
