Samosas with McQuade's Celtic Chutney

A while back, Blake Makes offered up a really nice giveaway--McQuade's Celtic Chutneys. I received the Fig 'N Ginger chutney in the mail and was really excited to try it with homemade samosas. I'd made these samosas once before and loved them, but they're a lot of work so it was nice to have a good excuse to make them again!

The samosas aren't hard to make, they just have a lot of components and so it takes a while to do it. But it's totally worth it--these samosas are really delicious! They were even better with the Fig 'N Ginger chutney. Even though I guess this is a celtic chutney, it went really well with Indian flavors and had big chunks of fruit. Yum yum yum.

Samosas (from The Moosewood Cookbook)

Filling:
2 large potatoes, cooked and mashed
1 c finely minced onion
2 medium cloves crushed garlic
1/2 tsp fresh-grated ginger root
1/2 tsp mustard seeds
1/2 tsp ground coriander
1/2 c diced carrots, cooked until just tender
1/2 c cooked green peas
1 tsp salt
juice from 1/2 lemon
2-3 T butter

Heat butter in a heavy skillet. Add garlic, ginger, onion, salt, and mustard. Saute 6-8 minutes until onion is soft and clear. Combine with potatoes, salt, and coriander, and pulse in the food processor briefly to combine (optional--you can just mix, depending how smooth/chunky you want your potatoes, onions, etc.). Remove from food processor and mix in all the remaining ingredients. Fold in the peas last, being very gentle.

Pastry:
4 c white flour
2 tsp salt
8 T melted butter
2/3 c yogurt
water

Make this dough in two batches. Sift together 2 c flour and 1 tsp salt. Add 4 T of melted butter, 1/3 c yogurt, and enough water to make a stiff dough. Knead until smooth and elastic. Make and fill the samosas with half the filling as described below (after the photos), and then repeat the dough recipe to make enough dough for the remaining filling.

Ready to fry!

Procedure:

Roll out the dough. The recipe recommends rolling it all out until it is very thin, and then cutting it into 4-inch circles with a cookie cutter. I found this was too fussy and the dough was too difficult to get thin. Instead, I pulled off walnut-sized pieces of dough and rolled them individually into roughly circle-shaped pieces, filling as I went. Any method that results in smallish, thin pieces of dough would be fine. Fill each dough circle with about 1 T of the filling (or as much as fits). Then brush the edges of the circle with water, fold over, and seal with a fork. This takes a little practice but you can get pretty fast.

Heat a 3-inch pool of vegetable, safflower, or soy oil in a heavy skillet or pot. I used a Dutch oven to prevent splatter, which worked very well. Heat to about 365 degrees, until the oil bounces a drop of water on contact (this takes a little while). Fry the samosas until deep golden, making sure not to crowd too many in the pot (I did about 5-6 at a time). Drain well and serve with chutney and/or raita.

This big pot was great to fry in as it kept the oil from spattering all over me.

Here are all the samosas with McQuade's chutney in the background!