The Great Pholourie Experiment (Part 1)

The SEasOning

The Pholourie is the quintessential West Indian snack. Growing up this Pakora-like Indian fritter was a staple finger food at any family gathering. My mother would usually end up getting on my case for stealing too many of them as she’d take them out the pot. If you ever find yourself in that situation, remember:

NEVER THIEF FOOD OUT OF A WEST INDIAN’S POT!

Every West Indian chef – especially mothers – are shoe ninjas. If you need an explanation on what that is, see Eddie Murphy’s bit in Delirious about that.

The pholourie is made from flour + a ground pulse, seasoning, and fried till crispy. It’s usually served with pepper sauce/tamarind/mango chutney.

Mama Singh always made this with AP Flour, besan (chickpea flour) and spinach. This seems to be unique to her. It’s a bit of a pakora/pholourie/saheena mash-up. However, I wanted to try out a more traditional approach to making these instead. The challenge being every West Indian has a variation on this. I finally settled on a variation of these recipes by taking elements from Matthew’s Guyanese Cooking on YouTube and Carribbeanpot.com.

Now here’s where the experiment comes in: batch #1 was done with besan (chickpea flour); the other with AP Flour.

The Ingredients

1 cup yellow split peas
Enough water to cover the split peas
2 tbsp Green Seasoning (this is the same as the marinade in the linked recipe)
1 cup AP Flour/1 cup + 3 heaped tablespoons Besan
2 tsp ground cumin
1 tsp tumeric
2 tsp active dried yeast
2 tsp baking powder
salt and pepper to taste
1 cup warm water

The Method

Rinse the yellow split peas under cold water. Place into a bowl and fill with cold water till the peas are covered. Soak overnight. If the water level drops, keep topping it off to keep the peas covered.
The next day drain the peas and place them into the bowl of a blender. Add 1.25 cups of water (you can use the soaking liquid or fresh water) and blend till smooth. This should yield about 3 cups of liquified peas.
In a bowl mix 1 cup AP flour, 1 tbsp green seasoning, 1 tsp ground cumin, 1/2 tsp turmeric, 1 tsp yeast, 1 tsp baking powder, 1/2 cup water and salt and pepper to taste. Stir well until incorporated and there are no dry clumps or lumps in the batter. Set aside for ~10 min
In another bowl. repeat step three but replace AP Flour with beasn
Heat oil in the deep frying vessel of choice. I’ve got an electric stove that I set on 6
Once oil is hot it’s time to fry. I use the two spoon method to get batter into the fryer:
Half fill a tablespoon with batter. Using the second spoon scrape it into the hot oil.MAKE SURE YOU’RE HOLDING THE SPOONS CLOSE TO THE HOT OIL!!!!!! Don’t drop the batter in from a height! Splashing around hot oil is just a dumb idea.
I usually fry these in batches of 8-10. That is going to depend on the size of your frying vessel. They’ll take 4-6 minues to fry till they’re golden brown. Use a spider to move them around the pot, and flip them over (so they brown on both sides). Once fried transfer them to a bowl lined with paper towels to drain.
Serve hot with pepper sauce and/or tamarind chutney and/or mango chutney. We’ll cover this in a later post.

Stray Observations

The batch with besan really needs the yeast and baking powder. You can add more baking powder too. The beasan is MUCH heavier than AP flour and could use all the help it can to get that lift.

The besan lends a nice nutty flavour, but you end up with a much more dense pholourie. For whatever reason, when making this batter with the same amount of water as the AP batch, the besan batter was a lot looser. That’s why I’ve added the additional three table spoons.

Both my wife and I preferred the AP flour version. However a wise man once said #foodisfood so you might like the besan version better.