Pretty Pakora

The pakora keeps getting better each time I make it. It's a bit scary to heat up oil to 375 degrees, but the high temperature ensures the batter stays on the vegetable and not the bottom of the pan. This time I doubled the recipe, so we'd have leftovers, and added turmeric and ajwain seeds and increased the amount of cumin. Our new favorite vegetable to pakora-ize is kale. It arrived in our weekly vegetable delivery, so we thought we try it. Sooo good—it holds less batter when dipped than the other veggies so the taste of the kale is prominent. The flavor of the other vegetables tends to take a backseat to the batter.

Oh, I also parboiled the vegetables first. Since the batter dipped vegetables don't have to stay in the oil very long, the partial cooking accomplished during parboiling makes the veggies, especially the denser cauliflower, easier to eat. I don't know if I've mentioned it yet or not, but we always eat this with ketchup. It's just easier to prepare (open the bottle) than chutney.

New Vegetable Pakora Recipe

I found a simple recipe for vegetable pakora on whats4eats.com. The batter calls for chick pea flour, water, oil, cumin, salt and hot chilis. Made it with zucchini and spinach--so yummy and so much better than the other pakora recipe (although I like the idea of having yogurt in it for added protein). The only other thing that I wished we had was a pot with a non-stick surface to prevent the batter from sticking to the bottom during deep frying. For lack of ingredients, we didn't make the recommended chutneys, but we are going to make them both tomorrow to serve with quinoa cakes.