Ben made an amazing dinner for my birthday, including this delicious chaat inspired salad! I shared this recently in my newsletter as an exclusive, but wanted to also put it up on the website too!
What is a chaat? It’s actually a street snack from India, with a delicious mix of sweet, salty, crunchy and fresh ingredients. The recipe below takes a bit of inspiration from the chaats that are in the Dishoom cookbook, but is a little bit more simple. What’s great is that you can use a variety of ingredients, often based on whatever you have on hand, as long as the final dish has the right balance of yogurt, spices, potato/veggies, chutney, coriander and then (importantly!) something crunchy like toasted nuts, friend chickpeas, fried dough balls etc.
INGREDIENTS
- 2 cups of potatoes, cut into bite sized pieces
- 2 cups of cauliflower, torn into florets
- 1 cup of cashews
- 2 teaspoons ground cumin
- 2 teaspoons paprika
- 1/2 teaspoon tumeric
- 1/3 a cup of olive oil
- 1/2 teaspoon chilli powder (opt)
- A bunch of coriander, roughly chopped
- A cup of plain yogurt
- 1/2 cup of olive oil
- 3 tablespoons of mango chutney
- Salt and pepper
METHOD
- Preheat your oven to 180Āŗc/356Āŗf.
- In a bowl, mix up the spices, salt and pepper and oil.
- The potatoes and cauliflower will cook at different rates, so you should roast them separately after mixing them with the marinade. So, halve the marinade and then coat the potatoes and cauliflower separately.
- Place them on two separate baking trays, and then cook in the oven until golden and cooked through. And a little crunchy! I usually start with 15 minutes and then stir the trays around, and then put them in for another 10 minutes, repeating until they are done.The potatoes will take longer to cook than the cauliflower, so take the cauliflower out once it’s cooked through and a little crispy on the edges.
- In a small pan, toast your cashews until they are crunchy, but be careful not to burn them.
- On a serving plate, take half the yogurt and spread it onto the plate. Scatter the potatoes and cauliflower around, and then add the cashews on top, making sure to get a good mix of each across the plate.
- Add dollops of the remaining yogurt on top, and then spoon mango chutney all around the salad. Finish with chopped coriander!
Looking for some other delicious recipes?