Week 6: Samosas

I try my hand at delicious Indian treats, avoiding grease burns and kitchen fires but somehow managing to gas myself half to death instead.

Pastry! Is there anything that conjures up more fear in the hearts of every true baker? Probably, to be honest. I mean, I'm not exactly a true baker, but I'm much more scared of waking up covered in spiders than I am of any kind of baked treat.

However, despite this, I chickened out this week. Once again, I avoided the technical challenge. I'd like to say I did this out of protest due to how obscure they've become - yes, we get it Paul, you know a lot about different types of biscuit, you must be absolutely fucking joyful to be with at parties - but actually it was because there was brûléeing involved.

I was going to go for it, but I don't own a blowtorch. After some experiments involving candles, string and me literally just blowing on some fire, I decided that a.) I was not as smart as I previously thought, and b.) I was likely to seriously injure myself if I kept this up. So I decided against it.

This left me with two options. I could either make a gigantic banquet pie - shaped like a mermaid, according to my "copy Kim-Joy" rule - or some samosas. I mean, the logical option there is clearly the pie. There's so much that could go wrong, it was guaranteed to be blog post gold.

But then I thought back to the week before, when I made spiced biscuits and people liked them. I got compliments for my baking. It was a strange feeling. It was almost… nice? Surely the aftermath of baking should be accompanied by intense shame?

I decided that I deserved another win. Rather than embarking on a pastry odyssey, fumbling my way through the construction of a mermaid pie like Donald Trump trying to do basic maths, I would make relatively simple samosas.

Samosas

The biggest challenge here was working out the recipe. This turned out to be a great big Frankenstein's monster of a bake, because the specifics of Kim-Joy's samosas weren't listed on the Bake Off website (or indeed anywhere else). They had Jon's weird chicken pesto abomination recipe though - presumably for the subset of the show's fanbase that considers ordinary samosas 'too ethnic' and had a collective panic attack when Nadiya won - so I used that to work out how to make the dough.

I had no such instruction for the filling, unfortunately. I researched and investigated all I could, feeling for a brief period like a kind of culinary Poirot. But when the metaphorical time came to sit everyone in the living room and accuse one of being a helpful recipe, I found myself unable to do anything but grumpily swear in a delightful Belgian accent.

I couldn't find anything more specific than what was shown on the actual show; all I knew was that the savoury samosa was paneer, onion and Kashmiri chilli, and the sweet was chai spiced apple. I had no idea what had actually gone into making them, but if there's one thing I know my way around, it's Indian food. It's by far my favourite thing to cook, so I decided it was time to improvise.

First off, the apples, and a distinct sense of unease. My experience with curries had not prepared me for this. But I had some chai teabags, so I had a good sniff of one and gave it my best shot. I chopped up an apple and added brown sugar, nutmeg, cinnamon, ground cloves and cardamom, and both fresh and powdered ginger.

It didn't quite taste right. Best I could guess, I'd overdone it with the nutmeg, and it wasn't as sweet as I'd expected. So I had an idea: I would cook the whole mixture to caramelise everything together. This wasn't the worst plan I've ever had, but at the same time, it also didn't work. The flavour hadn't changed after a good half an hour of cooking. If anything, I'd fried away the flavour of the actual apples. And made everything unpleasantly sticky.

Never mind; it would have to do. I added some crystallised ginger to the mix - another thing I spotted on Bake Off - and moved onto my paneer samosas. Now, you might have already spotted my next problem: paneer, being a cheese, is not in any way vegan. But I had a trick up my sleeve.

I bought some nice, firm tofu, pressed all the water out of it - believe me, after being a vegan for this long I know how to prepare a good batch of tofu - and marinated it in a mixture of spices, a splash of soy milk, lemon juice and some mustard. Then after a good half an hour, I fried it all up to seal those flavours in. Voila! Vegan paneer.

I added onions and spices to the pan, along with some other generic curry bits like fresh garlic and ginger, cooking everything together into a delicious mixture. Then, I added the chillies.

On the show, this was the part that Kim-Joy neglected until the last minute, and I was determined not to make that mistake. The only problem was that I couldn't find any Kashmiri chillies at my local Asian supermarket. The best I could get was birds eye chillies, which I assumed were the next best thing.

When I got home and actually looked it up, I found out that I was WILDLY WRONG. I had assumed that Kashmiri chillies were hot, but in actual fact they're milder than jalapeños. Birds eye chillies, on the other hand, are up to 50 times spicier. Woops. I had better use them sparingly.

I snipped the dried chillies into my frying pan along with the tofu-paneer mix, and gave it a stir. Then, I regretted everything in my life that had led me up to this point. Anyone who has cooked chillies before knows that they can turn the air into a stinging, burning tornado of fire, and for some reason the dried birds eyes were worse than I'm used to.

My eyes started to sting, and I couldn't breathe without coughing my lungs out. I wanted to open a window, but I knew if I stopped stirring then it would get worse, so I turned on the extractor fan and desperately fried the shit out of those chillies with tears streaming down my face, coughing and wheezing like Darth Vader after trying his first cigarette.

Eventually, it died down. I turned off the heat, made my dough, rested it for the appropriate time and rolled it out into small circles. The construction of the samosas actually went really well. They were fun to make, and they looked good. I began to get an apprehensive feeling of pride in my chest.

Then I had to deep fry them. I was fully expecting anything up to a full-on grease fire, but actually it went off without a hitch! I made sure the oil was hot enough before each batch, and I was careful not to lower too many samosas in at once. I think I overcooked one or two batches, but I definitely had a good crunch on them.

How did they taste?

I took the samosas over to my best friend's house, and I can't think of anyone better to comment on their flavour as she is frankly incapable of lying to me, even to be polite, so I knew I'd get an honest answer. With that in mind, when she called the savoury option "the best samosa I've ever had" multiple times, I began to feel that sweet feeling of happiness once again.

The sweet one didn't fare as well. It wasn't the best samosa she'd ever had, but it was - and I'm quoting directly here - "absolutely disgusting". Told you she'd be honest. And she was - as is generally the case - 100 per cent correct. They were not at all good. The filling was a nutmeg-y mush that managed to be too spicy and somehow too bland at the same time. Not one of my greatest successes.

But the vegan paneer samosas, I have to admit, were fucking fantastic. They had a kick to them, but thankfully the birds eye chillies hadn't overpowered the other spices and the taste of the vegan paneer still shone through. I am honestly so proud of these samosas. I will probably make them again, if I can make it through the rest of the series without having a stress-based aneurysm.

What did you do for dips?

I could find absolutely zero information about Kim-Joy's dips, besides the fact that they were vaguely white, so I made a raita and a whipped coconut cream. They were fine.

Are you looking forward to vegan week?

OH MY GOD YES. Prue and Paul are going to FINALLY tell me how to make a good vegan meringue.

What if it needs fancy ingredients and equipment that you can't afford?

Then I will BURN THIS FUCKING BLOG TO THE GROUND.

No recipe this week, because I eyeballed basically everything and didn't take notes so I have no idea how to replicate it.