Lip-smacking, colourful Kutchi Dabeli

Tasty Street Food: Kutchi Dabeli

This is an easy recipe for the lip-smacking, popular street food – Kutchi Dabeli? Dabeli is a flavour-packed street food that originated in Kutch, Gujarat. You could say it’s a kind of Gujarati burger. This tasty dish needs hardly any cooking and requires no special techniques that you’ll have to practise till you get them right either. Read on to discover how you could make delicious Dabelis at home in minutes.

Ingredients

6 pav/pull-part bread rolls

2 tbsp butter

Stuffing:

4 – 5 medium size potatoes (roughly crushed)

2 ½ tbsp Dabeli masala

1 tsp ground cumin

½ tsp turmeric powder

½ tsp Kashmiri chili powder

⅓ cup water

⅓ cup (approx.) date and tamarind chutney

¼ cup coriander-mint chutney

¾ cup finely chopped onion

¾ cup fresh pomegranate seeds

½ cup masala peanuts (spiced peanuts)

3 – 4 tbsp grated fresh coconut

½ cup fine sev

½ cup chopped coriander

1 tsp salt

1 tsp sugar

2 tbsp pure ghee

Dabeli Masala:

1 tbsp garam masala

1 tbsp dhania-jeera (coriander-cumin) powder

1 tsp Kashmiri chilli powder

1 tsp chaat masala

Date and Tamarind Chutney:

50g tamarind (de-seeded)

75g dates (de-seeded)

¼ cup jaggery or sugar

1 tsp ground cumin

½ tsp chilli powder

½ tsp rock salt

Soak the tamarind and dates each in ¾ cup of water. Transfer both along with the other four ingredients into a vessel and cook for around 20 minutes on a stovetop or 5 minutes in a pressure cooker. Puree the mix and strain it. Adjust the consistency to that of a thick sauce, bring it to a boil, and then store it in the refrigerator.

Procedure

1. Heat the ghee in a pan and sauté the crushed potatoes.
2. Push these to one side and then add the Dabeli masala (or the four spices mentioned above) to the ghee and sauté this for a few seconds before mixing it into the potatoes.
3. Mix in the turmeric powder and ground cumin and then 3 tbsp of the date and tamarind chutney. Add ½ tsp of salt and 1 tsp of sugar to the mix.
4. Pour in 1/3 cup of water and stir everything well. Heat it for a minute or two till the extra water evaporates and you have a soft and moist potato mix. Adjust the taste for more salt, sugar, or chilli powder.
5. Press the flavourful stuffing into a shallow dish and let it cool to room temperature.
6. Now sprinkle the toppings, one by one, on the potato stuffing – the chopped onions, grated coconut, masala peanuts, pomegranate seeds, chopped coriander, and the fine sev.
7. Slice each bread roll or pav, but let the two halves remain attached. Apply the coriander-cumin chutney to one half and the date and tamarind chutney to the other.
8. Add a generous scoop of the stuffing on the lower half of the bread and press the two halves together. Coat the open edges of the filling on all three sides of the pav with sev.
9. Heat some butter in a pan and lightly toast both sides of each dabeli bread roll.

Enjoy!