#sambusak

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Sambuusa Recipe | Homemade Pastry

A sambuusa, sambusa, samosa, samoosa, or samboksa is a fried or baked pastry with a savoury filling, such as peas, minced meat, onions or tuna. Its size and consistency may vary, but typically it is distinctly triangular or tetrahedral in shape. They are often accompanied by chutney. They are a popular entrée, appetizer or snack in the local cuisines of the Indian subcontinent, Southeast Asia,…

The original recipe dates from the Kitab al Tabiq, and like so many of the recipes in there, it's actually still made quite commonly around the Middle East and Turkey, under a variety of names. This is the standard set of measurements used, though obviously it will vary according to how many people you're trying to feed with it.

2 chopped small onions

1 teaspoon cinnamon

1/2 teaspoon each ginger and allspice

500g minced lamb

2 tablespoons tomato paste

50g (1/3 cup) roasted pine nuts

1/4 cup chopped coriander

2 tablespoons pomegranate molasses

375g filo pastry

100g butter

Cheese – feta, goat's cheese, sheep's cheese, or mozzarella – if you want.

THE OFFICIAL VERSION: Put a frying pan over medium heat, and put in olive oil. Add onions and cook them until they're soft. Stir in the cinnamon, ginger and allspice. Then put in the lamb mince. When it's been broken up and browned, stir in the tomato paste, pine nuts, coriander and pomegranate molasses. Sprinkle with sea salt and black pepper.

Next, preheat your oven to 180°C, and warm the butter so it just melts. Break out the filo and paint the top of the first sheet with melted butter. The put on a second sheet and do the same thing. Cut this lengthwise into 3 strips and stack them on top of one another. Put a  tablespoon of the  from the frying pan filling in a triangular shape near the end of the strip. then fold one corner of the pastry over the filling so that it forms a triangle. If you are not using meat, but have simply fried up the onions and nuts and stuff, then bulk out the filling with crumbled/torn cheese of your preference, as this is also traditional from the period. You can also mix cheese into the meat filling. Continue folding the triangle over itself along the length of the pastry strip, wrapping the pastry around the filling. Place the triangles on an oven tray and paint them all over with butter. Repeat with with filling the other two strips- you now have three triangular sort of... Persian Pasties. Bake them for 15-20 minutes or until golden. You can eat them cold too.

CAPTAIN WOLFRAM'S YULE BALL VERSION

For Lynette's elevation at Yule Ball 2017, I chose for various reasons to do a tray-bake version, like a Persian lasagne, rather than the triangular pasties. This was partly for convenience in working around the available oven space in the Feast kitchen, and partly because I wanted to be able to simply cut a larger amount of it into squares that people could take onto their buffet plates.

I also omitted the onions, so that Duchess Isabel, who was organising the evening, would be able to try it, and replaced the pine nuts with crumbled walnuts (they're cheaper, and more festive for the Yule season, plus they give it more body and go well with the flavouring). With pomegranate molasses being unavailable, I went with a mix of honey, rum, and tamarind sauce. I went with the meat and cheese version, using mozzarella simply because there was a huge bag of it grated available – feta would probably be more appropriate to the geographical area and the period.

So, I put on one sheet of filo, painted it with melted butter, put on the second sheet, then a layer of the cooked filling and grated mozzarella,then repeated the layers of filo with painted-on melted butter, another layer of filling, and so on until I had about three layers of each, with a single sheet of butter-painted filo on top. Into the oven for 15-20 minutes at 180, job done.

THE AERYS 2018 VERSION/HOW I MAKE IT AT HOME.

A couple of weeks ago I did some of this at home, and, rather than leave out the onion component entirely, I replaced them (at Vitus's excellent suggestion) with finely chopped celery and fennel. This works really well- they perform the function of onion with the flavouring, and the licquorice flavour of the fennel doesn't actually come out that strongly.

At home I use beef, because I'm allergic to lamb, and although I still prefer mozzarella just because I like it, I used feta in the most recent one, and that worked fin, of course.

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