So shakkar is another (Bengali?) name for jaggery? Then that's case closed.

I feel like getting back on the trail of cooking a good dhansak. Never did get it to taste right in the past.

A great thread and some tasty looking pics too. worthy of a bump I reckon.

Sorry to drag up such an old thread, but I've been trawling through some old stuff recently as it seems there's a lot more to learn from some of the old threads than some of our more recent contributions.

Can anyone solve the decade old mystery of what "sote" might be?  If it's "very very sweet" and added to dhansaks then surely it must be jaggery or white sugar? But do either of those have an Indian or Punjabi name which resembles "sote"?

Yeah it's worth giving this recipe a try. I still like the traditional triangular  shape samosa the best, but for ease I will be sticking with my Cornish pasty moulds I think.

I mix the pastry up in my mini Kenwood ch180a chopper thingy, with 180g flour, 2.25 tbsp oil, half level tsp salt (blitz these together) then add 40g warm water, blitz again then a further 35g warm water, blitz one more time then turn out into a small bowl and press together into a dough ball, cover and into the fridge overnight.

I think those are the same proportions from the OP, certainly I've never found a reason to vary from curryhell's recipe except to reduce a little bit the amount of potato in a batch of filling.

I picked up a set of pasty moulds in Lidl - I think they're mentioned earlier in this thread too. Certainly make the process of filling the samosas much quicker and easier, but do you get to call them samosas when they look so much like Cornish pasties??

My top tips are to make the pastry a day ahead and leave it in the fridge in a plastic bag or cling film overnight. Having made batches with freshly made pastry and pastry rested overnight the texture of the overnight pastry is far superior. All that flakiness and pimples you see in the photo seems to be accentuated by a long rest between mixing and rolling the dough.

The "dough cutters" as Lidl calls them have a cutter to the rear side which cuts a circle of  pastry, the this fits into the hollowed out top side so you can fill them, wet the outside with flour/water mixture then squeeze the whole thing shut to seal them.

My other top tip - wait a minute after rolling the dough before you cut the circles. The dough springs back and if you cut it immediately you end up with a pastry circle just too small to seal properly when you close the thing after filling it.  These were deep fried at 180C for 4 minutes to cook.

You might be waiting a while for Jerry to answer. I would've thought it's this recipe:

https://curry-recipes.co.uk/curry/index.php?topic=4076.msg36918#msg36918

That's an interesting thread worth reading.  Up until the point where it turned into a massive bunfight of course...

Just wondering if anyone has been using Karela to tenderise their lamb Tikka successfully? How long would you cook the Tikka on the stove before transferring to skewers? 

Finding some leftover cooked potatoes today in the fridge, I had a brainwave and decided samosas were in order, so I revisited this great recipe. The vegetarian version of filling recipe from the OP worked well with 200g cooked potato, quarter of a mug full of frozen peas and the same amount of finely chopped carrots. 750g of potato, as mentioned in the OP, seems way too much for those spice quantities IMHO.

Well the samosas were great and because I used only half the filling up, I'll be cooking more tomorrow. Just a simple classic indian snack and having scoffed a few for lunch I wonder why I don't cook these more often.  I guess they took an hour, start to finish. Not much effort for a good result.

Has Mr Naga changed? It's been a while since I bought a jar but it's always had a very characteristic, moreish flavour. What makes you say it's not as good as it used to be?

Tonight I made the "Pork Curry" from this book. I wasn't too impressed with it to be honest. The overall impression was that it was underspiced and a bit of a waste of pork, as it was a lot of meat and not so much sauce.  I interpreted the spoon measurements to be heaped rather than level, but even with this interpretation the final dish was fairly bland.

The sauce which did remain after 50 mins of simmering quickly separated on the plate, with the water being sucked into the rice and a dry paste remaining.

Of course the book isn't BIR and doesn't claim to be, but I was hoping it was going to be a useful source of traditional style recipes.   I think I'll stick to BIR.