Indian pastries

Mouth-watering photo of samosas, courtesy of Alex Menton

Creative juices were flowing this weekend as my girl Alex and I had an almost-incurable hankering for samosas. There’s just something so comforting about that carb fest, loaded with spiced potatoes and peas.

We decided to take on the challenge ourselves and make the Indian pastries from scratch…. well, almost from scratch. For simplicity sake, we used store-bought phyllo dough. But, honestly, there is absolutely nothing wrong with using store-bought dough, especially phyllo dough. Who has time to hand-roll hundreds of razor-thin sheets of dough? We opted for phyllo dough instead of a more traditional puff pastry because we wanted to achieve a more delicate, flaky, non-greasy crust, and phyllo dough was ideal.

After peeling and steaming chunks of Idaho potatoes, we sauteed thinly sliced onion, ginger, and garlic with an array of aromatic spices, including cumin seed, mustard seed, red chili flakes, turmeric, and garam masala. We combined the onion mixture with the potatoes and mashed everything together, making sure the filling was still rather chunky. We seasoned it with a healthy dose of salt and added in defrosted peas. Lastly, we tossed in freshly chopped cilantro and gave the filling one final mix.

We set the filling aside, and using five sheets of phyllo dough at a time, cut the stack longways so that we had two long rectangles of dough. Then, we took a heaping spoonful of the potato mixture and piled it at one end of each rectangle. Like making a paper football, we folded the dough over the filling in back-and-forth triangles, and repeated this process until all of the filling and dough were used up.  We brushed each potato parcel with a generous amount of olive oil and baked them at 350F for about 25 minutes.

Although they were piping hot when they came out of the oven, we eagerly devoured half of our entire batch! They were delicious – light, crunchy, and perfectly spiced. All we needed was a side of homemade chutney for a pungent pop of complementary sweet flavors….. oh well, that’s a whole other blog post topic.