I’ve previously posted at least three recipes for alur-dom/dum alu (here, here and here). You might think that’s enough but here’s a fourth. Alur dom/dum alu is made in certain broad ways in the parts of India that make dishes by that name. I do like more traditional ways of making it but I also think of the name of the dish as authorizing all kinds of approaches: as long as you cook potatoes, covered, in a thick or thin gravy with masala I think you’ve made alur dom/dum alu. You may disagree but that’s how I see it. Anyway, I don’t know why I’m leading this post off with these observations because this recipe is nothing very wild or unexpected. The only really unusual thing here is the use of small purple potatoes. Everything else is just a matter of plus/minus from ways in which you might already make alur dom/dum alu. You could, of course, make this dish with small yellow or red potatoes as well but I really like the sweet flavour of purple potatoes and think they work particularly well here. Give it a go and see what you think. Continue reading
Tag Archives: Potatoes
Khatta Alu
Tok is Bengali for sour and also the name of a broad genre of dishes that feature sourness, often imparted via the use of tamarind. Alur tok, or “sour potatoes”, is one such dish in the genre. I am, however, calling this dish khatta alu, which is Hindi for “sour potatoes” because the ingredients owe more to the North Indian spice box—broadly speaking—than the Bengali one. There’s no panch phoron here, for example, only zeera or cumin seeds, and the other major spice is coriander seed. There is, however, a Bengali touch at the end: the sprinkling of bhaja moshla over the finished dish. Bhaja moshla is the name of a family of masalas made by dry roasting and then powdering a mix of spices (the word “bhaja” means fried but no oil is used in the roasting). There’s a fair bit of variation in the recipe from home to home but they all provide a burst of flavour to whatever dish they’re sprinkled over. I use my mother’s recipe but as it is proprietary I am not going to share it with you—some secrets even idiot food bloggers must keep. You can google recipes for yourself or you can just use whatever garam masala you have at hand. Continue reading
Masala Alu with Dried Cranberries
I guess you could call this a Thanksgiving recipe. I confess freely that I originally added cranberries to this dish only to troll my friend Aparna who has a hatred of all things cranberry-related that can only be due to some kind of unexamined trauma. She stopped talking to me for weeks when I made oats pongal with dried cranberries. I can only hope that she will get help and some day make her way to eating this dish which is very tasty indeed.
In making this I was trying to recover the faint taste memories of a similar dish that a gent I worked with briefly in my advertising days in Delhi in the early 1990s used to bring to work in his lunchbox. His family had an old-school cook and his lunches were always very good—the rest of us pillaged them mercilessly. Anyway, I have no idea if I actually managed to replicate any part of the dish except the colour—I suspect the original had yogurt in it as well—but this is very good and very different from the usual dum-alu that you may associate with North Indian potato dishes. Give it a go. And you probably still have enough time to make it as a Thanksgiving side today. Continue reading