2020-05-12: Indian Potato Pea Curry - Aloo Matar

The finished Aloo Matar dish

Today was a nice, but cool, day without much wind. We did not have a lot of leftovers from the prior day. It was time for a nice Indian curry dish. Lets start.

My prepped ingredients.

I peeled 4 Yukon Gold potatoes and cut them into 2cm cubes. We had some leftover canned tomatoes (I my particular case 3 tomatoes and their juice). I also chopped a small onion, 3 garlic cloves, a knob of ginger (about 2 to 3cm long) and 2 Thai birds eye chilies. I took some frozen peas out of the freezer (1 cup give or take). Last but not least I chopped a handful of cilantro leaves (not visible in the above picture). To that assortment I added the spice and salt containers and voila, everything was ready for the actual cooking.

Frying the cubed potatoes in the wok with some oil. The potato frying phase in the picture is close to its end.

I started with frying the potato cubes in some oil in my wok over medium heat (typically I try to avoid overheating when frying potatoes). After about 10 minutes the potatoes more less looked like in the above picture. Then I took them out of the wok into a bowl, leaving as much of the oil in the wok as possible.

Frying the onion, garlic, ginger and the Thai peppers

Then I started stir-frying the chopped onions, garlic, ginger and Thai pepper for a while. I also added a little bit of salt to draw the juices out of the onions during the stir-fry. This took about 5 to 8 minutes.

Frying the tomato masala sauce.

Then I added the spices (1 tsp turmeric, 0.5 tsp chili powder, 1 tsp garam masala spice) to the oily onion mixture and stirred things around for a minute over relatively low heat. The goal was to mix the spices into the oil and onions. Then I added the canned tomatoes with their juices. I also added about 1 to 1.5 tsp of salt. Subsequently I tried to chop the tomatoes in the wok with my spatula a bit and fried the mixture for a minute or two. Then I added about 0.75 cup to 1 cup of water and brought the now much more liquid mixture back to a boil. I boiled the mixture for about 2 minutes to allow the tomatoes and the water to infuse everything. The above picture was taken from this stage.

The tomato masala mixture after the potato cubes were added.

Now I added the previously fried potato cubes back into the tomato masala sauce. I put a lit on the wok, lowered the heat and simmered the contents for about 12 minutes. I used my spatula to mix the ingredients twice to expose everything evenly to the heat.

During the final 3 minutes I added the frozen peas, and the chopped cilantro, and mixed them evenly into the potato tomato mixture. 3 minutes are enough to heat up the peas and for the cilantro to infuse its flavor into the dish.

That is it. The finished, ready to eat, dish is shown in the picture below (still in the wok) and in the first picture (in a bowl taken out of the wok).

The finishing stage of the dish in the wok with the peas added.

The tomato sauce used in this dish is called a tomato masala. The word masala is used in 2 different meaning to my knowledge in Indian cooking. One meaning refers to a spice mixture (the garam masala spice mentioned somewhere above and used for this dish). The 2nd meaning refers to a sauce with different ingredients (a mixture of ingredients), in this case a tomato, water, onion, garlic, ginger based sauce (plus importantly the Indian spices that give such a sauce its unique character).

In my dish above, I possibly used 1 tomato and the corresponding juice too much. Normally it contains a bit less tomatoes. It is also possible to make the sauce a bit more creamy by adding some ground cashew nuts or some cream. But in this particular case I am fine with just the tomato and water mixture.