Recipe of the Month: Malai Kofta

On Friday, Brian spontaneously decided to try making Malai Kofta, those spicy little potato dumplings often seen at Indian buffets, floating in a creamy coconut-based gravy. This dish had always been a favorite of his in Indian restaurants, but he found it a little annoying that there always seemed to be too much sauce and not enough dumplings. And since he knew he had a can of coconut milk in the pantry for the sauce, he thought, why not give it a try?

Many recipes for Malai Kofta call for paneer, an Indian soft cheese. Since we didn't have any of that on hand, and since we've been trying to cut down on dairy anyway, he found a vegan version of the dish at One Green Planet, which used a combination of potato, carrot, and peas for the dumplings. (It also called for two tablespoons of chopped toasted cashews, which gave him an opportunity to use up a little handful of those that had been lurking in our pantry for a while.)

However, he still ended up having to make quite a few substitutions to this recipe make it work with what we had in our pantry. These included:

• Replacing the chick pea flour in the kofta, which we didn't have, with regular flour.
• Replacing the tomatoes in the sauce with canned crushed tomatoes.
• Replacing 1 cup of coconut milk and 1 cup of water with one can of reduced-fat coconut milk from Trader Joe's. In the first place, that was what we had, and in the second, using the whole can didn't leave us with any little dregs left over that might be hard to use up.
• Replacing the serrano pepper, which we didn't have, with 1/4 of a jalapeno pepper, which contains about the same total amount of heat.
• Replacing the yellow onion, which we don't keep on hand these days since I found they tend to disagree with me, with half of a milder red onion.
• Omitting the cilantro from both the kofta and the sauce, since (a) we didn't have any, (b) it's expensive to buy at the store, and (c) I don't care for it much anyway.
• Increasing the salt in the gravy from a barely detectable quarter-teaspoon to a full teaspoon.
• Adding a teaspoon of brown sugar to the gravy to sweeten and soften the flavor.

Between the vegan recipe and the changes Brian made to it, this dish came out a bit different from the versions we'd had before. One change that Brian appreciated was that the recipe made plenty of dumplings, so we could take as many as we liked instead of being limited to one lonely little kofta swimming in a sea of gravy. I also noticed that the texture of the dumplings themselves seemed to be chewier, perhaps due to the absence of the crumbly paneer or perhaps because of the flour-for-chick-pea-flour substitution. They were still quite tasty, but a bit hard to cut through with a fork. It almost seemed like they'd work better as a finger food, with the gravy on the side as a dip, rather than a main course served in a bowl over rice. But aside from this minor quirk, the dish was pretty much the same as the one we'd enjoyed before in Indian restaurants: lightly spicy dumplings in a tangy gravy flavored with coconut.

As to whether we'd make it again, I'd say that's mainly up to Brian. I liked it and would certainly be willing to eat it again, but I didn't love it so much that I'd request it specifically. So it's a question of whether he was happy enough with the results to be willing to put in the work required to make it. Asked about this, he said it "required a bit of coordination" but wasn't really that hard to make, and he rather enjoyed doing it. And another perk of the recipe is that all the ingredients in it, aside from the cashews and coconut milk, are things we tend to keep in the house. All in all, Brian says he'd "happy to make this again at the next opportunity"—and maybe even go so far as to put cashews and chick pea flour on the shopping list specifically for that purpose.