About this recipe
Samosa salad — samusa thoke — is a favourite Indian-Burmese street snack that turns the samosa into a tossed salad. Fried samosas are broken into pieces and mixed with sliced onion, cabbage, tomato and mint, a spoonful of chickpeas or split peas, a ladle of light spiced gravy or dal, and a dusting of chilli and masala, then finished with lime. It is savoury, tangy, spicy and crunchy-soft all at once, and it belongs to the cooking of Myanmar's long-settled Indian and Muslim communities. This book presents it as a Myanmar street dish with that Indian-Burmese lineage acknowledged, distinct both from a plain plate of whole samosas and from other South Asian chaats; the attribution and history are logged for verification.
Recipe facts
- Yield
- 4 servings
- Prep
- 25 minutes (with prepared samosas)
- Cook
- 15 minutes (for the gravy)
- Total
- 40 minutes
- Difficulty
- Easy
- Spice
- Medium
Allergens Contains gluten (samosa pastry) and legumes (chickpeas/peas); typically vegetarian. May contain dairy if the samosa pastry uses ghee. Check the samosas' own ingredients. See the halal-status field.
Development draft. This is an untested development recipe from the cookbook project. It has not been kitchen-tested, and the quantities and timings are the author’s working draft rather than a verified result.
Ingredients
The light spiced gravy (or use a thin dal)
- 1 tbsp (15 ml) neutral oil
- 1 small onion, finely chopped
- 2 cloves garlic, minced
- 1/2 tsp (1 g) ground cumin
- 1/2 tsp (1 g) ground turmeric
- 1/2 tsp (1 g) chilli powder, to taste
- 1 cup (200 g) cooked yellow split peas or chickpeas, with a little of their liquid
- 1/2 cup (120 ml) water
- Salt, to taste
The salad
- 6 fried samosas (potato-and-pea), at room temperature
- 1 onion, thinly sliced
- 2 cups shredded cabbage
- 2 tomatoes, chopped
- 1/2 cup chopped mint and coriander
- 1 to 2 green chillies, sliced (optional)
To finish
- 1 tsp (2 g) chilli powder or masala, to sprinkle
- 2 tbsp (30 ml) lime juice, plus wedges
- Salt, to taste
Equipment
- Small saucepan for the gravy/dal
- Large mixing bowl
Method
- Make the gravy: heat the oil, fry the onion and garlic until soft, add the cumin, turmeric and chilli powder and cook a minute. Add the cooked split peas or chickpeas with their liquid and the water, and simmer to a loose, spoonable gravy, 8 to 10 minutes. Season with salt; keep warm.
- Break the samosas into bite-size pieces and put them in a large bowl.
- Add the sliced onion, cabbage, tomato, herbs and optional green chilli.
- Spoon over enough of the warm gravy to moisten (not drown) the salad, and add the chilli powder, lime juice and salt.
- Toss gently so the pastry stays in recognisable pieces, and taste for salt, heat and sourness.
- Serve at once, with extra lime wedges, while the samosa pieces still have some crunch.
The Complete Edition
Samosa Salad sits in the Myanmar chapter
The book carries this recipe in full alongside the rest of the Myanmar chapter, the pastes and dips it is built on, and the twenty-seven pantry studies that open the collection.
In review with Amazon KDP
Both editions have been submitted to Amazon Kindle Direct Publishing and are currently in review. Submitted prices are $9.99 for the kindle edition and $49.99 for the paperback. Neither is on sale yet, and prices are as submitted rather than final.