How to Make Authentic Indian Samosas at Home

Hi Bold Bakers, I would love to introduce you to Ami, she helps me here with all of our recipes for Bigger Bolder Baking, recently she shared a recipe for samosas on the website and they were really popular so we're gonna make them today. Hi everyone, I'm really excited to share this recipe with you, I grew up eating samosas and I really love them. Ok, so let's get started. Ok. We're gonna start with some flour in our bowl, then a quarter teaspoon of salt. Next to the flour we're gonna add ajwain, which is also known as carom seed, it's something that you'll find in an Indian grocery store, it's not something that is necessary if you can't find it, but it definitely gives the samosa dough its very distinctive flavor. I have a little smell. Yes. Oh, it smells like samosas. Yes, exactly. So how much of this bad boy? We need one teaspoon. One teaspoon. Ok, so now we just want to stir in all our dry ingredients so they're evenly mixed. Ok. After that we're gonna add in oil, just plain vegetable oil, should I put that in? Perfect, yep. Ok. If you don't have vegetable oil, what can you use? Like a canola oil? Yeah, canola oil, sunflower oil, anything, just any neutral flavored oil. You want a little fat to mix in to the dough. Alright, so you can start a little bit with a spoon but eventually you'll probably need to use your fingers to really get the oil mixed really evenly in with the flour. Perfect. I'm a big advocate for getting your hands stuck in there, especially when it comes to doughs. It's really important, isn't it? Yeah, and it kills you. Yeah, just to feel what's going on, you know how much liquid is in there. Absolutely. So Ami, tell me, what is a samosa, what's the definition of a samosa? Well, according to me it would be sort of a savory filling, in my family traditionally we would eat peas and potatoes or anything vegetarian encased in this dough that we're making right now and then it would get deep fried. But I do know that in different parts of India people have meat fillings, ground lamb in particular. Yeah, that sounds good. Did you know that in Ireland we eat a lot of Indian food? Really? A lot of Indian food. We love it. Is there a big Indian population? There's not, I think it comes from the British influence. We would have, my parents would cook a lot of Indian food, we'd have a lot of Indian takeaways. Things like samosas, is a bhaji a traditional Indian thing? It's like a mix of vegetables. Yeah, I love an onion bhaji, curries, all that sort of stuff. And how are we looking, does this look good, nice and crumbly? This looks great. So next we're gonna add water. Ok, do I use my hands for this as well? Yeah, definitely. They're already dirty, right? It's like 6 or 7 tablespoons so I'll usually start with 5 or 6 and mix it in and see how much more I need. So I'll go ahead and pour it in for you. Perfect, yes please. We know that around here, Ami, because every time we make a dough or a bread or anything like that, we never add in all the water. Yeah. That's a rule that we all know. Perfect. We'll probably want a little bit more but we'll start with that. Ok, I'll go ahead with my hands. What you want to create is sort of a stiff dough. When you squeeze it together in your hands, you don't really want it to break apart. You want the dough to be stiff enough to be able to hold all of our filling without breaking apart in the oil. Ok. But you still want it pliable enough to be able to roll it. Yeah, I might need a splash more water. What do you think? Yeah, definitely. I didn't realize it was so easy to make samosas. It's nice that you can do this dough by hand, isn't it? Yes. Yeah. It's very simple. Yeah. So your mom and dad are Indian. Yes. They're from India. Yes, they are. So you obviously grew up with a lot of traditional Indian food. I did, I did. I mean, certainly, you know, kids growing up in America, you know, we loved pizza and pasta and my dad would every now and then grill and all that. But mostly my mom cooked and she cooked vegetarian Gujarati Indian food. My mom had this amazing ability to make this, you know, five course Indian meal in half an hour. And I don't know how she ever did that. Yeah, mine was the same thing. Not Indian food, Irish food. I mean, how am I doing? I think that's looking good. Do I need to knead it on the counter? You can or you don't even. Sometimes I just leave it in the bowl. Ok. And I'll just give, once it's nice and smooth, as you can see, it's like, it's nice and smooth. And then when I talk about a stiff dough, like if you're like holding it and you're squeezing it. Yeah. And it kind of, it doesn't really break. You know, you don't really see your fingers through it. So yeah, if you like you squeeze it, it doesn't break through. It holds its shape and but it's still sort of pliable is the kind of texture that you want. Great. OK, so now that our dough is nicely kneaded together, we want to let it rest for about half an hour. So we'll just cover it up to keep it from drying out. I have a shower cap here. In the fridge or on the countertop? Just on the countertop. OK, so we're going to set that over there. You know, I think this is good timing. Can we get started on our filling while this is resting? Sounds perfect. Perfect. OK, so filling. I stuck on a few potatoes. I like to steam them until they're nice and tender. I used floury potatoes and we have them here nice and warm in a bowl. OK, so they're roughly mashed. And then to that, we're going to add a tablespoon of garam masala. And then we'll add amchur, which is a dried mango powder. It adds a nice tang to the potatoes. We'll also add ground coriander, salt and some fresh squeezed lemon juice. So this is what I know as a traditional samosa, a potato and peas and spices and things like that. Zach mentioned that he had them in Ohio with chicken. What is the traditional way, what way would you normally see it? Well, for me and my family, this would be traditional. But I do know that I've gone to plenty of Indian restaurants where they have lots of different fillings, ground lamb, other kinds of meat. Oh, I would like that. So but I, my family's vegetarian, so this was our traditional fillings, just peas and potatoes. Well, I can see, you know, in Ireland why this would be so popular because it is a fried dough filled with mashed potatoes. So I mean, yeah, we're all about that. So do I mix this up or anything? Yeah, you can mix it up. You want the potatoes to have a little bit of a structure, so not totally mashed. They can be finely chopped. They can be kind of roughly mashed. Either way is fine. Okey dokey. All right, Gemma, while you're mashing up the potatoes, I have a pan heated here with some oil and to that we're going to add in some cumin seeds, our chopped ginger and chopped chili. I'm going to stir that around for about 30 seconds. It's going to get nice and fragrant. After that, I'm going to turn off the oil and we can pour this mixture right into the potatoes. I'm just going to add the peas in there and then we're going to stir everything together. Oh, smells good. Yeah. Now, you might want to give it a taste. See if you want to add in a little more salt, a little more lemon juice, more garam masala. What do you think? You don't need to tell me twice. Oh, yummy. It's good? Oh, so yummy. All right. So it looks like we've got our filling all set. So we'll put that aside to cool down for a bit and we'll start rolling our dough. OK, so we're ready to divide up our dough and roll it up. So this is all, you know, very sort of by hand and by feel. To divide this dough, we're going to divide it up into about six equal pieces, so I'll give you half. OK. And so we've got about half the dough and then we're just going to take fistfuls and roll them up like this. OK. How many am I supposed to get? You'll get three. Six? Oh, three. So you're going to divide the dough into six equal pieces and you know it by hand. So you can kind of take bits of dough and kind of keep squeezing them all together. And if they feel, once they feel more or less even, it doesn't have to be exact. This is very technical. Hey, it's how I did it. Whatever works. I have no judgment here. So if you want smaller samosas, you can make them into smaller pieces, but sometimes I find them a little bit bigger is a little easier to handle. So we'll do six equal pieces. You could do seven. OK. Great. OK. So we're going to take one ball of dough and we can just work with one at a time. OK. And then do you want to roll it out? Do you want me to roll it out? Do you roll it with a rolling pin? Yeah. So we'll roll it with a rolling pin. OK. So we're going to kind of flatten it out. You kind of want to roll it into a circle. OK. So we'll do this. And you want the circle to be about an eighth of an inch thick. And this dough is going to stretch a little bit and pull back on you. So just work with it. It'll eventually get to the thickness you want. So Ami, let me just see what, because I love measurements and precision, how big would you say you're rolling this to? I guess about a six inch circle. Six by six? Yeah. Kind of six inches by six inches. OK. Cool. OK. So we're ready to fill. Great. We're all rolled out. We have a circle. I want our circles and we're going to just take, you can take a knife. I like to use this round cutter. That's a good idea. Pizza cutter. And just give it a nice even cut. Now along the seam side here, we're going to take a little bit of water with our finger. Will I do one the same time you're doing one? Yeah. Why not? Yeah. So we'll, yeah, we'll do that. We'll just kind of moisten the edge. Yeah. Like that. And then we're going to fold it over into a cone. OK. Like that. And then squeeze it. Yeah. OK. So you're going to fill about a teaspoon or two of filling. So you're going to have to monitor me because I am a devil for stuffing and filling. Right. Well, you know, the samosa won't wet you because if you overfill it, it just won't shut. Oh, I'll still get it in there. Trust me. Well, I'll tell you what. As much as you can fill in, the better. That looks great. So once you got that in, you got it kind of packed in. Yeah. You take a little bit more water. OK. And you moisten the edge. Yep. Like this. And then just squeeze it together. OK. Do you know what? You didn't stop me, but I put in more filling. Well, yours are going to taste amazing. I told you to stop it. Well, there you go. But this is how you get that traditional shape. That's so fun. Like that kind of triangle. Yeah. There it is. Oh, lovely. So while we're filling these, Ami, I mentioned there briefly, you're my right hand woman when it comes to our recipes and so much that we do on Bigger Bolder Baking. You help me test right recipes. We do big bulk shoots here where we've done, I don't know, you know, we've done almost like probably one hundred and thirty recipes. So much fun. And so it's a lot. It's a lot of fun. And we just spent a few days like just making recipes, developing and photography with Carla. And it's really great. Yes. So a lot of the stuff you've been seeing recently actually is thanks to Ami. So if you've got any crazy ideas for recipes, let us know because Ami will make them for you. I'll tell you what, I love working with Bigger Bolder Baking. It is so much fun. It's really like it's the best time. Ami, I think that's it. We have them all done. Yeah. We had a nice little chat. Look at that. I have to say, I think my last one. Isn't that nice? Look at that. Practice makes perfect. On that note, we're going to fry these off. Yes. So I have a pot or a pan. Let's get some oil heated up and get these bad boys cooked up. OK, let's go. So we've got our pot of oil heating up and the surface is going to start shimmering a little bit. So, you know, the oil is nice and hot. And a nice way to test the oil is if you put a little pinch of dough right in the oil, you're going to notice that it starts to sizzle and float right up to the top. And at that point, you know your oil is hot enough and you're ready to start frying. Place your samosas very carefully into the oil so that the oil doesn't splash back into your hand. You want to have only two or three samosas at a time so that your oil temperature doesn't go down. I usually go by color more than time. So when it's nice and golden, you're going to give it a flip and fry up the other sides. When they're nice and golden on both sides, you want to lift them carefully out of the oil, tap out the excess oil and then place them on a baking sheet lined with paper towels to drain. Ami, these look absolutely gorgeous. I like how you brought a little bit of your culture to Bigger Bolder Baking. Now I'm going to bring a little bit of mine and serve these with Sherwood's mango chutney, which is very traditional in Ireland. It's lovely and sweet and it's just a really lovely compliment. Fantastic. I'm going to dip that in there. I can't wait to try. Oh. Oh my gosh. Mmm. Oh, I love this chutney. I told you. See? Oh man, it's so good. Mmm. Yum. Samosas are spicy. Fantastic. And soft. The texture. This dough is really gorgeous, Ami. Yeah. So good. Absolutely fantastic. The recipe is on my website. Thank you so much, Ami. I hope you're going to come back and cook some more breads and more Indian dishes with us. Absolutely. Thanks, everyone. Yeah. Thank you so much. I'll see you again really soon. Should have some more chutney there, Ami. Yeah.