Hinger Kochuri

Kolkata's soft breakfast puris of white flour, stuffed with a thin paste of black gram, ginger, fennel, and asafoetida, fried until they balloon, and eaten with potato curry or cholar dal

Origin: Kolkata & West Bengal, India

From the journey of Asafoetida.

Hinger kochuri means asafoetida kachori, and in Kolkata it is less a pastry than a stuffed luchi: a soft disc of white flour dough, rolled thin around a smear of black gram paste flavoured with asafoetida, ginger, and fennel, and fried in hot oil until it balloons. Kolkata's sweet shops sell them through the day, but they are above all a breakfast, eaten hot with a potato curry, alur torkari, or with cholar dal, the sweetened Bengal gram dal of festive mornings. It is a dish of a city that has always had to import its asafoetida. The resin came down the rivers from Agra, as the English merchant Ralph Fitch saw in 1586 when he travelled to Bengal with a fleet laden with salt, opium, and 'Hinge', and in twentieth-century Calcutta the Afghan pedlars called Kabuliwalas still sold it from door to door with their dried fruit. Bengali cooking uses it sparingly as a rule, in a few dals and in the onion-free vegetarian cooking called niramish, and the kochuri is the dish that carries its name. It shares its name with the crisp, flaky hing kachori of the Braj country and Rajasthan, and the two are often confused; but the northern kachori is a pastry with a dry, crumbly filling, fried slowly, and the Bengali kochuri is a soft bread with a thin filling, fried fast. The asafoetida is the thread between them.

Ingredients

Dough

  • 250 g plain flour (maida)
  • 2 tbsp vegetable oil or ghee
  • 0.5 tsp salt
  • 120 ml warm water, approximately

Filling

  • 100 g split skinned black gram (urad dal), soaked for 4 hours and drained
  • 1 tsp fresh ginger, chopped
  • 1 green chilli
  • 0.5 tsp compounded asafoetida, dissolved in 1 tbsp warm water
  • 0.5 tsp fennel seeds, dry-roasted and ground
  • 0.5 tsp salt
  • 0.5 tsp sugar
  • 1 tbsp vegetable oil

To fry

  • 750 ml vegetable oil, for deep-frying

Method

  1. Make the dough. Rub the oil or ghee into the flour and salt, add the warm water little by little, and knead for 5 minutes to a smooth, soft but not sticky dough. Cover and rest for 30 minutes.
  2. Grind the soaked dal with the ginger and green chilli to a smooth, thick paste, adding no more than a spoonful of water.
  3. Heat the oil for the filling in a frying pan over a low heat. Add the dal paste, the asafoetida water, the ground fennel, salt, and sugar, and cook, stirring constantly, for 5 to 7 minutes, until the paste dries and comes away from the pan in a soft mass. Leave it to cool.
  4. Divide the dough into 16 balls and the filling into 16 small portions. Flatten a ball, place a portion of filling in the centre, gather the edges over it, and pinch them closed. Roll it out gently with a little oil, not flour, into a round about 10 cm across.
  5. Heat the frying oil until a scrap of dough rises at once, about 180°C. Slide in one kochuri at a time, press it gently under the oil with a slotted spoon so that it balloons, turn it once, and lift it out when it is pale gold, after about a minute.
  6. Drain and serve hot with potato curry or cholar dal.

Notes

Kolkata sweet shops sometimes make the filling with roasted gram flour instead of soaked dal. Compounded asafoetida usually contains wheat flour, and the dough is wheat in any case.

The Gastrographer

The Gastrographer

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Ingredient originTrade or transit route
Became a culinary stapleColonial / trade control
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