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Cholle recipe

by Steve, February 25th, 2006

Okay, Wacky Mommy, you’re not the only one around here that can post recipes.

Made a big pot of this for dinner tonight. My goodness, it’s good and tasty. Cholle is a North Indian garbonzo bean dish. It’s very easy to make and very tasty. The only “exotic” ingredient is garam masala. If you can’t find garam masala, don’t despair. It’s just a mixture of cinnamon, cloves, black pepper and cardamon.

I used a ton of garbonzos I had cooked previously and frozen. They were in a 12 cup freezer container. With that many beans, the unit of measure for the spices was 1 tablespoon. So where it says “1part cumin”, I used 1 tablespoon. You could certainly use more, but this seemed about right to me. I used about an onion and a half, a couple tomatoes and nice chunk of fresh ginger, about the size of my thumb.

cooked garbonzo beans
oil
1 part cumin
1 part coriander
1 part turmeric
1 part red chili powder (or chili paste)
2 parts garam masala
onion, chopped
fresh ginger, grated or minced
tomato, chopped or pureed
salt to taste
fresh coriander (cilantro)
fresh green chili, sliced
fresh lime wedges

Cook beans ahead of time and have ready. (To cook dry beans, soak for several hours, 4 parts water to 1 part beans. Bring to boil and cook until tender—up to two hours. You can “quick soak” by boiling for a couple minutes, then soaking for an hour.)

Chop onions and sautee until golden. Add cumin, ginger, dry coriander, turmeric and chili powder. Sautee another couple minutes. Add tomato. Cook some more.

Add garbonzos (with enough cooking water to cover) and garam masala. Salt to taste. Cook on low heat for a while.

Garnish with fresh cilantro, chopped onions, green chili slices and lime wedges. Also great with grated daikon radish. Serve with paratha (bread).

(We’ve been doing a lot of fresh cilantro and sliced green chilis for a garnish lately. Works equally well for Mexican, Indian, Thai, etc. It really gives a meal a special touch.)

This entry was posted on Saturday, February 25th, 2006 at 8:07 pm and is filed under Me, Recipes. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

2 Responses to “Cholle recipe”

  1. Comment from ben:
    March 5th, 2006 at 7:47 pm

    I thought this was quite good. Tried out the recipe tonight and it was a delicious success. One addition I made was lemon, something that rounded out the tomato flavor nicely. I ate it with bread as suggested but felt like rice would also have been appropriate. Thanks for the idea and I’ll be trying out the cilantro/chili garnish more often as well.

  2. Comment from HImself:
    March 6th, 2006 at 8:28 am

    Hey Ben, glad this worked for you. Re. lemon, the original recipe I adapted this from called for pomegranate, so you’re definitely on the right track.

    The impetus behind me learning to make cholle is a little Indian lunch counter me and the boys at work habituate. Cholle is one of the staples. They make Samosa Cholle, which is two samosas smashed on a plate, smothered in cholle, two kinds of spicy chutney, grated daikon, fresh cilantro and chopped red onion. The other is Aloo Tikki Cholle, which is two potato patties fried on a grill, then smotthered in the same manner.

    They also make a rockin’ Masala Dosa (a crispy pastry roll-up with potatoes and coconut chutney, served with sambar. And there’s more. The main items on the menu are all less than $4 and are guaranteed to satisfy even the hungriest computer jockey.

    The only bad part is they’re closed on Monday. So I’ll have to figure out something else for lunch after my noon-hour pick-up hockey today.