Khasta Kachori

I was never fond of kachoris while growing up and hadn't tried making them at home. However, after a request from a family member, I decided to make it at home. These kachoris turned out delicious. I saw a few videos on youtube and understood that the key to a pastry/khasta texture and bite is to fry the kachori on really low heat. 

Also, I have realized the kachoris taste delicious with stuffing like aloo sabji or choley instead of just chutney. So next time you make or buy kachoris, try it out with some stuffing.

Ingredients:

The cover

4 cups all purpose flour

3 tsp salt

8 tsp ghee

water to knead a soft dough

The filling

4 heaped tsp coriander seeds

3 heaped tsp fennel seeds

1 heaped tsp cumin seeds

2 tbsp oil

¼ tsp Asafoetida / Hing

1 inch ginger, grated

2-3 green chillies, finely chopped

1 tbsp kasoori methi, crushed between palms

1 tsp red chili powder

2 tsp - garam masala

1/2 cup besan/chickpea flour

1 cup - Moong dal (soaked and coarse ground)

1 tsp black salt

salt to taste

1 tsp sugar

1 tbsp - amchoor /raw mango powder

oil for deep frying

Method 

For the cover

Add the salt and ghee to the all purpose flour and rub the ghee in. The ghee should be very well mixed with the flour. The test to check if the quantity of ghee is enough is to clench some flour in your fist and when you open your fist, it should retain its shape and not fall apart. Then add water to the flour and make a soft dough. Knead till soft and pliable and then keep aside to rest. Cover it with a towl or platic wrap. Taste the dough, and make sure it has a slight salty taste and not bland. Else after frying, the cover will taste very bland.

For the filling

Soak the mung dal till soft (2 hours) Mix together the coriander, fennel and cumin seeds and coarsely grind it. Heat oil in pan and add the hing and then add the ground seed mixture. Stir fry till fragrant and then add the ginger and green chillies, then add the garam masala, kasuri methi, red chilli power, black salt and black pepper. Then add the besan and mix well and cook till the besan starts to smell fragrant. Then add the the mung dal and cook till a dry mixture is formed. If you feel it is too dry, you can add some more oil. However, since this is going to be deep fried, I didn't add anymore. Add salt, sugar, and amchoor powder. Mix well and taste, adjust seasoning if needed. The dough should be slightly salty, since it will get less salty after frying.

Assembly and frying

Take a fistfull of dough and roll it out into a thick 2.5"-3" puri. It should be not be thin. Then add a 2-3 tsp of filling in the center. Gather the edges and bring it together and bring the dough together and pinch it well to seal well. If there is any extra dough, remove it. Flatten into a disc using your palm and roll it lightly to form a thick disc, about 3" diameter. Make sure that the cover is not too thin while you do that.

Heat oil in a deep frying pan. The oil should be luke warm and not too hot. Keep the heat on low/low flame. Then add the kachoris. It should take a couple of minutes for the kachori to start to puff up and start coming to the surface of the oil. Do not be tempted to increase the heat. Once they are puffed up, you can increase the heat slightly, and then fry them till golden brown on both sides.

Serve warm with chutney or potato curry or chole.

Tips

Soak the mung dal in hot water. The mung dal will be ready to be ground in 30-40 mins. This recipe will make about 20 good sized kachoris. Each batch of kachoris takes about 15-20 mins to fry.

Homemade Cultured Butter, from Cream

I remember that there was always homemade butter in the fridge growing up. But I always used to prefer the store bought salted uncultured butter as a child. Now that cultured butter is not easily accessible, I really miss it a lot. Especially when I eat the Marathi flatbread called Thalipeeth. It was another dish I really wasn't fond of, but enjoy a lot as a grown up. It is interesting how tastes that remind us of childhood become important to us as adults.

One of the main reasons why butter is made at home in India is because the milk is not homogenized and so the cream floats to the top. This is scooped out over a period of a week or so. A teaspoon of yogurt starter is added on the first day, so that the cream does not spoil and the added cream continues to get cultured as it is collected. Finally, the butter is churned and separated into buttermilk and butter.

I have been buying non-homogenized cream top milk off late and decided to do the same. You can also add culture to store bought cream and make cultured butter. This will be much faster than waiting for 7-10 days to collect enough cream to make a decent quantity of butter.

Ingredients
Cream, store bought or collected over a period of 1-2 weeks
1 tsp of homemade or greek yogurt (greek yogurt has a higher concentration of the bacteria which culture the milk product. This can also be used as a yogurt starter to make yogurt at home)

Method
Add a tsp of yogurt (as a culture starter) to the cream. If you are collecting cream daily, keep stirring the next day's cream into the same container. If you are adding a tsp of yogurt starter to a cream container from the store, then warm the cream, let it cool down till lukewarm and then add the culture. Then keep this aside for a few hours or overnight to set into a yogurt/cultured cream.

Once your cultured cream is ready, make sure it is very cold and then stir it or place in a jar which  you can shake. Add a couple of icecubes and then churn till the butter separates. Doing this manually by using a churner or shaking a jar takes a lot of time and is laborious. You can instead pour the cream in a blender and then turn on the blender till the cream separates into butter and water. The watery part is buttermilk.

Add cold water to the separated cream and then scoop out the butter solids. Addition of cold water makes the butter milk dilute, so you can pour the buttermilk out and then add water a couple of times to the butter to remove any remnants of butter milk. This diluted buttermilk is a great nutrient to plants which like acidic soil, like curry leaf.

Tips
To store, add water to a container and then place the butter in this. Change this water daily to keep the butter fresh. You can now melt this butter to make homemade ghee.

Wheat Halwa, Lapsi, Kadah Prasad

I lovingly remember the wheat halwa or as she called it "lapsi", that my mom used to make for us when I was a young child and I remember relishing it. She used to make this especially if we were hurt because of the simple and nourishing ingredients. I also recently got to know that the same is also offered as "kadah prasad" in gurudwaras. 

I hadn’t made it because it felt too much of a guilty indulgence given the amount of ghee and sugar/jaggery that are needed. However, I finally caved into my craving and made it. My mom used to make it using jaggery, but I didn't have the time to grate jaggery, so I added blackstrap molasses to the sugar to get a similar taste. The fragrance and the taste catapulted me back to childhood. A delicious and satiating dessert.

Ingredients
1/2 cup wheat flour
1/2 cup ghee
1/2 cup minus 1tbsp sugar
1 tbsp blackstrap molasses
1.5 cups water

Method
Heat ghee and wheat flour together and roast the flour till golden brown and fragrant. In another saucepan, add the sugar, water and molasses and stir and warm till sugar is dissolved.
Now slowly add the water solution to the browned flour and stir it in, taking care to protect yourself from any spluttering of the ingredients that occurs.

Stir well till thickened and you can see the ghee staring to separate. At this point the halwa will easily move away from the edges of the pan and will freely move in the pan. The halwa is ready. Enjoy warm.

Tips

When water is added to the fried wheat flour, it will splutter, so make sure you are far away from the pan and if possible hold a cover over the pan so that it doesn't spoil the cooking surface.

Molasses Bread - Cheesecake Factory style

This is a beautiful brown bread that comes very close to the bread that is served in the Cheesecake Factory. Warm bread slathered with butter is delicious and just melts in the mouth. In my opinion, this version of home baked bread is tastier than that served at the restaurant. 

I was able to make 5 decent sized loaves of bread and they lasted a few weeks. I stored each by covering tightly with plastic wrap and then foil and then freezing it. 

Ingredients

2 1/4 cups All purpose Flour or bread flour. I used all purpose flour
1 2/3 cups White whole wheat flour -I used roti flour (ashirwad aata). You can also use regular whole wheat flour
1 Tablespoon sugar
1 1/2 Teaspoons Salt
2 1/4 tsp of Instant Yeast
1/4 Cup Honey
1/4 Cup blackstrap Molasses/regular molasses
1 1/4 Cup Warm Water
2 Tablespoons unsalted butter at room temperature
1 Egg lightly beaten with a tsp of water to make egg wash
1/4 cup of Oats

Method
In the bowl of a stand mixer fitted with a dough hook add the flours, yeast, sugar, and salt. Mix until combined. Slowly add the honey, molasses and water. Mix until the dough forms. Add the softened butter and keep mixing until the dough forms. Knead till the dough separates from bowl.  You may need to add a little bit flour if it is still too sticky. Then knead the dough with hand till the dough is soft and smooth.
Grease a bowl large enough to hold double the volume of bread dough with some oil and place the ball of dough and cover with plastic wrap. Let the dough double in size about 45-90 mins depending on ambient temperature. It will take longer on colder days.

Remove dough from bowl and divide into 5 equal parts and shape into logs. Place these on a well greased trays (I needed two cookie trays) and let rise till double in size. Cover loosely with plastic wrap.

Preheat oven to 350 F. Brush the tops and the sides of the bread logs with the egg wash and sprinkle with the oats.

Place the trays in the oven and bake for 25-30 minutes of until ready. The easiest way to determine if the bread is well baked is to test the internal temperature. If it is 200F or more the bread is baked. Else you can also tap on the bottom and if it has a hollow sound it is baked.

The use of blackstrap molasses gives the bread a deep brown color. This bread has a slightly sweet taste and is delicious.

Tips

If kneading by hand, use the banging of the dough onto the kneading surface and then stretching with your palm strokes technique of kneading bread dough till a soft dough is formed.

Sprouted Whole Wheat Bread

I enjoy sprouting wheat and used to make sprouted wheat bread a few years ago. I had forgotten the exact recipe and decided to try my hand at another version of it. It was difficult to find much online where the wheat berries were directly used instead of the sprouted wheat flour. I found a reference to Ezekiel bread which is a mixture of wheat and lentils and then decided to try out a basic bread recipe and see where it goes. The result was surprisingly tender and moist. The bread was hearty and delicious.

Ingredients

3 cups sprouted whole wheat berries (wheat berries were soaked overnight in water and then placed in a big sieve. These sprouted over a period of 48 hours).
A little water if needed to grind berries
2 tsp instant yeast (or if you have starter dough from another batter, add a handful instead and let this ferment overnight)
1 tsp salt
1 tbsp oil
Whole wheat flour a couple of 1/4 - 1 cup, depending on the moisture in the berries

Method

Grind the whole wheat berries to make a coarse batter. Use the minimal amount of water required in your blender or food processor. I used a food processor. Add the salt, yeast and oil and then add a little flour at a time to create a soft dough. It’s ok if it is a little sticky. Keep aside for 15-20 mins and then knead again to make a smooth dough. (I added a ball of dough from another overnight no knead recipe that I had made in the earlier day instead of the yeast and let it ferment overnight.)

Shape it into a ball and place in a bowl greased with oil to prevent sticking. Let this rise till double in volume. Will take about an hour or more. Then flatten out the dough and shape into a rectangle about 5x9 inches in size. My baking tin is 9 inches long. The length should be approximately the same as your bread baking rectangular tin.

Then roll into a tight roll with the shorter end parallel to you so that you have a 9 inch rolled bread dough.

Grease the baking tin with oil or butter and place the dough in it for a second rise. Once the dough had doubled in size, almost to the edge of the tin, bake at 350F for about 1.5 hours. I baked it for 40 minutes but the bread was not completely baked, so I continued to bake it till the center measured 200F, which took another 40 minutes approximately.

This bread does take longer to bake than normal. You can tent it with foil if you think the top is getting too brown.

The end result has crusty edges and a moist interior, is nutty and delicious. A hearty bread which is not at all dense.

Tips

Precook the wheat and try this bread. I will be trying that version the next time I make it. 

A Hybrid of Gyoza/Potsticker/Springroll - gluten free

Every year I make ukadiche modak (steamed rice flour covered modak) at least once and most of the times I end up with left over rice flour dough. I usually save this extra dough by covering it with plastic wrap and keeping it in an airtight container. Most of the times I make some more sweet stuffing and then use the leftover dough to make more modaks. However, this time I didn't want to indulge in more sweets and wanted to use the dough for something else. We had eaten gyozas a couple of weeks earlier and I thought why not make something similar using this dough. The filling I made was similar to the springroll filling and the resultant hybrid gyoza-springroll was crispy and delicious. I plan to use this recipe often instead of using rice flour dough only for modaks.

Ingredients
1 cup rice flour
1 cup water
1/8 tsp salt
1 tsp ghee
1 small onion or 1/2 onion finely chopped
1 carrot finely grated
1/4 cabbage finely shredded
5-6 green beans, finely diced
3-4 garlic cloved, finely minced
1/2 inch ginger, finely grated
1 green chili, finely diced (optional)
2 tbsp oil
1 tsp vinegar
soy sauce to taste
salt to taste
chilli sauce to taste

Method
For the dough
To make the rice dough, bring the water to a boil in a deep saucepan, add ghee and salt.  Once the water is boiling, add the rice flour, stir and turn off heat. Cover this and keep aside for 10 mins. Then knead the dough while still warm but can be handled without getting burnt,  till it is glossy and shiny.
Your dough is ready. Cover with a towel and keep aside.

For the filling
Heat oil and add the onion, green chili (if using), ginger and garlic and cook till onion is translucent. Then turn up the heat and add all the other vegetables one at a time starting with the green beans, carrot and then cabbage. Stir fry till the veggies are cooked but still crunchy. Add the vinegar, salt, soy sauce and chili sauce. Taste and adjust seasoning. Turn off heat and let this cool down.

To make the gyoza
Take a ball of dough, about a fistful, and shape into a smooth ball. Flatten it make a disc and then using your fingers, thin this disk as much as possible to create a flat round thin disc. The dough should be thin enough that it doesn't break.

Then put 1-1.5 tbsp of filling on one side of the center leaving enough space around the edges,  to fold the disc onto itself in a semi circle and seal the edges. You can pinch the edges down to make a design. You can also shape this into a modak shaped dumpling.

To cook, heat a broad saucepan (ceramic or nonstick will help prevent sticking), and add 1 tbsp of oil to the pan. Once it heats up, place the gyozas on the pan and let one side cook till the side starts to brown a little and releases from the pan easily. Then flip it over. Add 1/4 cup of water to the pan and cover the lid immediately. Let this steam on medium heat till all the water evaporates (3-4 mins). The water will splutter, so be careful during this step. Then, remove the lid and let the gyoza brown. Flip and make sure both sides are golden brown. Serve hot with a sauce of your choice (gyoza, or springroll sauce).

Tips
Use a food processor, if available,  to knead the dough this so that your fingers don't burn.

Pudachi Vadi/ Sambar Vadi

Pudachi vadi was definitely something completely new for me.  This is a deep fried delicacy where the stuffing is primarily made of cilantro. The closest snack which is similar to it would be bakarvadi. I hadn’t heard of it till a couple of years ago. And the way I learnt about it was from a Marathi daily soap (who says watching television isn’t educational, eh!). 

So fast forward to  present day, I was having a conversation with friends and family and this came up. I was  told ‘it tastes great. I used to enjoy eating it.’  So, I thought, why not try making it at home. That is the only practical way for me to taste it. 

This is also known as sambar vadi in Nagpur and supposed to be a speciality from the region (not related in anyway to the lentil based sambar). This is because coriander/cilantro is called sambar in Nagpur. I recently found out that it is also available in Kolhapur.

Of course the challenge with making something you’ve never seen or eaten before is that you don’t know if what you create is the right thing.  But my taster attested that, it had turned out exactly what he had eaten growing up.

It is delicious, the family loved it and I think I’ll be making it again and again.

Ingredients

Stuffing 
2 bunches cilantro - finely chopped, use thin stalks too
2 tsp white poppy seeds/khuskhus
2 tsp sesame seeds/til
1/2 cup dry coconut flakes
4 green chillies
4 large garlic cloves
10-12 green onion leaves
2-3 garlic scapes/leaves if available
1/2 red onion finely chopped
Salt to taste
1 tsp goda masala

For the cover 
2/3 cup whole wheat flour
1/3 cup all purpose flour
1/2 tsp baking powder
2 cups besan
1 tsp haldi
1 tsp chili powder
Salt to taste
3 tbsp oil

A Paste made of 2 tsp goda masala, 1 tsp tamarind concentrate, 1 tsp sugar, salt to taste

Method

Mix all the ingredients for the cover. Then add little water at a time and knead it into a hard dough (like for a puri). Set aside.

In a pan dry roast khus khus, and sesame seeds. Then dry roast the coconut flakes. Let it cool and the grind to a coarse powder. Grind the chillies and garlic. I used a mortar and pestle to make grind it.

Heat oil in same pan and add the chopped. The Add the garlic chili paste to the onions. Cook well and add the cut onion greens and garlic scapes. Sauté for a few mins and then add the cilantro. Cook for a few minutes then add 1 tsp goda masala. Cook for a few mins to dry out. And let cool. Then add salt to taste and mix well. This stuffing should be fairly dry.

Take a small ball of dough, enough to roll into an oval puri about 3 inches long. Roll small oval puri about 2 mm thick. Not too thin and transparent but more like samosa cover. Then apply a layer of the paste made with goda masala and tamarind.
Then line up about 2-3 tsp of the filling in the center along the length of the oval. Then wrap the two shorter ends together to make a roll. Seal the edges well. Use some water along the edges if needed to make sure that they edges stick. Using your fingers and palm shape the roll into a triangular shape if you like. This is not required but provides a shape to your vadi.

Heat oil in a kadhai. Fry on medium heat like a samosa till very well browned and crispy. They will crisp up further as they cool. On a ceramic electric stove top, I started the process at 7 and then fried it at 5.

Cut into smaller pieces and serve or serve full rolls. These taste amazing even when warm and can be served immediately upon frying.

Can also store in airtight container for 2-3 days or refrigerate for longer storage. Warm up in oven to crisp up if stored for a longer time.

Tips

Wash all the greens and let them dry before cutting. This will minimize the moisture introduced into the stuffing. If the edges are not sealed well, the roll will unravel and the filling will spill into the oil.
You can lightly panfry them with a tsp of oil before frying, to ensure a tight seal, cooking the sealed edge. Make sure that you do not brown the rolls during this pre-cooking process.
If you feel the rolls are not crisp enough after cooling down, then bake them in hot oven heated to 400F for 10 mins. Place them on a cooling rack and then on a baking cookie sheet/tray before placing in the oven for good air circulation and to avoid darkening on one side of the roll because it is in contact with a baking sheet/tin.
If you don’t have goda masala, substitute with dhania-jeera powder (1:1 ratio).