Saturday, March 21, 2009

Saag Paneer Samosas

I have to start out by saying that I did not come up with this idea on my own. I didn't sit down and think "what if I put one classic Indian dish inside of another one?" as if I were trying to invent the next turducken. I've actually eaten "saag paneer samosas" at a restaurant (Indebleu) and so all the "you are bastardizing a cuisine" comments should go to them. ^__^

But I will take credit for stealing Indebleu's idea.

I learned two important things while making these samosas:

  1. Adding a coating of oil to the outside of the samosas before baking them made the dough all flaky... on the inside. I don't understand this, scientifically. My first samosas were baked "dry," with no oil, and the outer crust was solid as Barack. Rub a little olive oil on the outside before baking, and suddenly the inner dough begins to flake a bit, croissant-like. Of course, the real reason the dough flaked might have had to do its juicy innards, which brings me to:
  2. Samosas don't seal up when they're full of wet saag paneer. This doesn't make sense, because Madhur Jaffrey says to use water to seal the tops of the samosas, and the saag paneer mix was very wet, so it follows that the samosas should have had no problem staying closed, but the seams all fell apart in the oven.
But, as I've written before, "surface area does not affect taste," and they were certainly tasty. ^__^

Next up I really really really want to samosa a PB&J. (Okay, now you can accuse me of bastardizing a cuisine.)

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