Take-away Veg Pakora at Home

This is the seriously excellent and cheap recipe for veg pakora, refined over the last few months. It's well worth the effort of sourcing, roasting and grinding the whole spice for both the pakora and their sauce.

You can find all the less common ingreediments at Bismillah on Nicholson Square. If you don't have your own potter (H-who-is-very-good-to-me) to make you a mortar and pestle for grinding, fear not. Your kiddos or a handy kidult will be happy to place your spices in a plastic bag and use an ordinary hammer to percussively reduce them to powder.

Ingreediments
Whole garam masala, dry-roasted and ground
Anardana (dried pomegranate seeds), dry-roasted and ground
Mustard seed
Kalonji (black onion seed)
Tamarind paste
Chopped coriander leaf
4 or 5 medium potatoes, peeled and chopped to a large dice
3 onions, chopped
Gram (chickpea) flour
Self-raising wheat flour
Salt
Natural yoghurt
Veg oil

Method
Soften your onions in oil for 10 mins or so and reserve, then Bombay your potatoes so;
Toss 2 tsp of mustard seed into a frying pan of medium-heated oil. When the seeds start to pop, add the tatties and 3 tsp ground garam masala. Add salt, then saute the potatoes for about 20 mins with a lid on top, turning occasionally.

Assemble a sweet/sour yoghurt dipping sauce by mixing the yogurt with tamarind paste in a 3:1 ratio, adding chopped coriander leaf, garam masala and kalonji. You can buy ready-made tamarind paste, or alternatively soak a quarter of the dried fruit blocks in boiled water, extracting the seed husks and blending to a paste.

Make the pakora batter with a 3:1 mixture of gram flour to self-raising, with a large pinch of salt. Add water and mix to a stiffish pancake-batter consistency before tipping in the veg along with 2 tsps anardana and 3 of garam masala.

Heat a wok with 1 litre of sunflower oil. When sufficiently hot, an experimental drop of batter will sizzle and rise. At this point, scoop aliquots of veg and batter mixture (palm size) and gently drop into the wok, four pakora at a time. Keep the cooked pakora warm in a low oven while frying subsequent batches.