Samosas are just one of those foods that it only makes sense to make in huge quantities. The production requires lots of steps: making pie dough, peeling, cutting, boiling potatoes, cutting and frying onions, grating ginger, and forming the little bastards. So if it’s going to take the time for the work anyway, double the recipe.
So yesterday, we made 4 dozen at the Brooklyn Kitchen. We were following the New Moosewood Cookbook Samosa recipe, but changed it in a couple of ways (with all due respect to Mollie). Not perfect, but damn good. Two are filling, but you just can’t stop.
Pie Crust:
2.5 cups all-purpose flour
1/2 t salt
5 T butter, big diced and chilled for 10-15 minutes in the freezer (this I added)
1 cup buttermilk (Mollie also would allow yogurt)
Mix the flour and salt in a big bowl. I used a wide stainless bowl, and an antique wire pastry blender. Add the chilled butter, and cut it up until the butter pieces are largely indistinguishable. Too much mixing, and there will be no flaking. Add the buttermilk, half a cup at a time, and mix until there is no more loose flour.
Dump out the mix onto the board, and mix into a lump with your hands. If this were a pie, I’d mold it into a fat disk, but since this is intended for smaller little pie lumps, I formed a snake. I stored the snake away for an hour while i worked on the filling.
Filling:
2 potatoes, peeled, cut into 1″ pieces and boiled
1.5 cups frozen peas, unthawed
1 cup onions (about 1/2 large)
4 cloves garlic (Mollie said 2)
1 T fresh ginger, grated
1 T fresh ginger, minced
2 T rice vinegar
1 t cayenne powder
1 t curry powder
smidgen cinnamon
1 T butter
Soak the minced ginger in the rice vinegar and set aside. This helps both break down the fibers of the ginger, as well as flavor the vinegar. Melt butter in saucepan and add onions, garlic, ginger, and spices for about 5-7 minutes, until everything is glossy and awesome, the onions are transparent and the whole thing is perfect. Dump all of the filling ingredients together and mix it up.
Take the snake out. cut him into little 1″ pieces.
roll the pieces out into 5″ little pieces.
there will be a lot
hold the piece in your fingers, making a little cup
and fill ‘er up
and bake!
15 minutes at 425, drop to 375 for 10, or until brown. Because I had two sheets in, I think the airflow around the sheets was hindered, so the bottom sheet took a little longer. cook them until they are brown and crusty.
Next time I will try it with cardamom (as Mollie lists) to create more of a low spice note. With the ginger and the vinegar, the samosas, while AWESOME, were a little high on the spice register.
The Brooklyn Kitchen 