A few years back, I spent a while staying with very little money in Brisbane, and found a Hari Krishna cafe which served really nice food, really really cheap. I think it was run barely at break-even point as a rather inspired way to get people to think nice things about the religion. That’s a bit irrelevant however.
I ate there pretty much every lunchtime for 2 weeks- because they had the most gorgeous vegetarian kofta balls. I mean, it was all nice, especially for a couple of dollars, but these were awesome. Were served in a tomatoey based sauce, and were almost melt-in-your-mouth squishy taste explosions. I’ve tried veggie kofta balls whenever I’ve seen them sold since, and they’ve been a resounding ‘Meh’, at best.
I’ve not been able to find any recipes that even look close to being the same things, but I’ve been craving these damn things for weeks now, and England’s a bit far away to pop over to get some.
Are you talking about malai kofta or a kofta without any curry/gravy?
This one is the closest approximation I could find to the one I use: malai kofta.
Sometimes what I’ll do for the kofta balls is, instead of potato, use gram flour and, instead of the mixed vegetables, use squash (I think the recipe I use calls for opa, but I use yellow summer squash).
Lots of recipes don’t have a smooth sauce. I really prefer it that way and run all the really solid items through the blender. You can also use a Cuisinart to make the kofta. It creates a more uniform dough.
Ooh, that does look like it could be similar! It definitely had no crunchy bits, but maybe without the nuts… I’ll have to try it tomorrow.
Unfortunately, all I remember was ‘balls, called Kofta, in tomatoey stuff, tasty’, so… umm… I don’t know if I mean Malai or not. I’m aware this isn’t a lot to go on, but I figured I might get some nice ideas to work out something similar to the memory.
Yep, that sounds like either malai kofta or veggie kofta curry.
One thing I just recently discovered with Indian cooking is that, if you want a tomato-y sauce to taste similar to what you’d eat in a restaurant, when tomato sauce is called for, use tomato paste instead and add water as needed. Also, if a recipe uses just tomato, toss in a couple of tablespoons of tomato paste. The paste adds a little tang that plain tomato sauce or plain tomato can’t quite replicate.
