When I published my recent post on Trinidad street food, the eagle-eyed ones of you would have noticed a glaring omission to the round up. Pholourie – fried balls made from spiced flour and served with either a mango or tamarind sauce.
For some reason, every Indian food stall I visited while I was in Trinidad either didn’t sell or had run out of the delicious snack. Now that I’m back in the UK, I’ve cooked my own home-made pholourie. I used the recipe from my Trini food bible, The Multi-Cultural Cuisine of Trinidad & Tobago and the Caribbean: Naparima Girls’ High School Cookbook. I converted all the measurements from cups to metric and imperial as well as scaled it down so that the portions were right for two people. It made around 20 small balls. It would be simple enough to scale it back up again if needed.
Where I live, it’s not easy to get hold of split pea flour without buying it off the internet, so I made my own. I have a little processor that’s for grinding spices so I used it to powder some dried split peas. It worked surprisingly well – I just sieved out the few residual lumps.
Simply combine all the ingredients (except the water) into a large bowl, make a well in the centre, pour in the water, whisk and spoon teaspoonfuls into pre-heated oil. A useful tip: dip two teaspoons into the cooking oil before you heat it. Use these to drop the batter into the pan – it will just slip right off!
I looked for tamarind concentrate in the supermarket to make a sauce to accompany my home-made pholourie. Instead, I came across a bottle of imli pani, which I’d never heard of previously. Apparently, it’s served alongside panipuri.
The imli pani ingredient list includes tamarind, sugar, cayenne, salt, chilli, mint, cumin coriander, mixed spices and black pepper. Not a million miles from a Trini ‘tambran’ sauce!
My pholourie was delicious – crisp on the outside, soft and spongy on the inside, with a lovely flavour. If I’d known how quick and easy they were to make… I might have set myself up with a street food stall – I’d clean up!
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Home-made pholourie
Ingredients
- 250 ml/8¾fl oz vegetable oil for frying
- 85 g/3oz split pea flour
- 80 g/2¾oz plain flour
- 1⅓ tsp baking powder
- ¼ tsp turmeric
- ¼ tsp salt
- ¼ tsp pepper sauce
- 1 clove garlic finely chopped
- 125 ml/4½ fl oz water
Instructions
- Fill a deep, heavy-bottomed pan with vegetable oil up to at least the 8cm / 3" mark
- Dip two teaspoons into the oil and set them aside to use later
- Preheat the pan of oil over a medium flame
- In a large mixing bowl, combine the split pea flour, plain flour, baking powder, turmeric, salt, pepper sauce and garlic
- Make a well in the centre and add the water
- Whisk together to form a thick batter
- Using the pair of oiled teaspoons, carefully drop a teaspoon of batter at a time into the hot oil. The size of my pan meant I could fit about 6 pholourie at a time
- When the pholourie begin to float (less than a minute), turn them over using a metal skimmer or slotted spoon so they cook evenly
- Remove from the pan onto some kitchen paper to absorb the excess oil
- Repeat until all the batter has been used
- Eat immediately
Serve with tamarind sauce or pepper mango chutney on the side
