Chutney Baby One More Time

Chutney. It’s an Indian condiment. It might be made with herbs, or fruit, or chili peppers, or vegetables, or just about anything. It can be sweet or sour, spicy or refreshing, pungent or zesty, smooth or chunky. Like porn, you might not be able to define it, but you know it when you see it. It may in fact be easier to define it by what it’s not–achar, or the other main type of Indian condiment, which is an herb, or fruit, or chili pepper, or vegetable pickled in oil.

Sometimes chutneys are tempered with oil. That’s different.

The chutneys that a Western audience might be most familiar with are the coriander/cilantro chutneys, mint chutneys, green chili chutneys, and tamarind chutneys that are often served with samosas from Indian snack shops. Those coriander or mint chutneys–the coriander ones often also contain mint, and the mint ones often also contain coriander leaves (cilantro), so though they are not identical they can be quite similar–are also the most common chutneys, if the internet is to be believed, for use in chutney sandwiches.

A chutney sandwich is, quite simply, chutney between two slices of bread. Some people may put butter on their chutney sandwiches; others may not. Many will slice the crusts off and serve them like tea sandwiches. People may add cucumber, or tomato, or avocado, or any number of other individual vegetables to a chutney sandwich, but if you add too many and overwhelm the thin swipe of chutney at the heart of the sandwich, it has become something else, a vegetable sandwich or a Bombay sandwich.

So I gathered my chutneys–I chose a mint chutney, but also a green chili chutney just for the heck of it–my cucumbers, my tomatoes and avocadoes, and my Indian sandwich bread, and I made some sandwiches.

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I buttered my bread, the better to keep the chutney from soaking into the crumb and making the sandwich soggy. I made one simply spread with mint chutney

And I made another with the fiery green chili chutney

Since I was sharing these sandwiches with some more spice-averse members of my family, I only used the green chili chutney in this one sandwich. For the sandwich with cucumbers though, in addition to the mint chutney, I added some sandwich masala and chaat masala.

I also added sandwich masala to the chutney and tomato sandwich

and to the chutney avocado sandwich.

I made all 5 sandwiches ahead of time, cut off the crusts, sliced them into triangles and served them to both Mindy and Ian. Ian only tried a few, but Mindy took a bite or two of each.

They were fine. The mint chutney sandwich like what I expected, a bright and slightly sour combination of mint and cilantro spread onto buttered bread. The green chili chutney was less intense than some I’ve had from Indian sweet shops when ordering my samosas–it didn’t have that same way of clinging to the tongue and accumulating as some of the sweet shop chutneys I’ve tried. Cucumber is an ideal vehicle for a mint or coriander chutney, and the ripe sweet tomatoes and firm fatty avocados all worked as expected, providing additional flavor and texture while continuing to feature the chutney as the main flavor of the sandwich.

It was all so–expected. Indian cuisine is exciting, wide-ranging. There should have been more to a chutney sandwich than this. I did some more searching.

First I found something called a “sandwich dhokla.” Dhokla is a type of steamed savory cake made from a batter of fermented rice and lentils, and topped with a “tempering” oil, infused with ingredients like mustard seed or curry leaf. The “sandwich” type of dhokla makes this into a layer cake, with a swipe of green chutney between the two layers.

Of course though I had the powdered mix for the batter, and I had the green chutney, I did not have most of the tempering ingredients. No curry leaves. I didn’t even have any sesame seeds. I winged it by using Everything Bagel seasoning for the sesame seeds and a mixture of basil leaves and lime zest for the curry leaves.

This was nowhere near an adequate substitute. The dhokla was interesting. It tasted good, not great. But it was pretty, and at least somewhat like a sandwich.

The more I searched though, the more interesting chutneys I found. In Goa they make chutney sandwiches with a coconut and coriander chutney. There are chutneys made from fruits like mango that vary from sour to spicy to sweet, depending on the area or India or even on the person making the chutney. There are “groundnut” chutneys made from peanuts that are essentially a spicy peanut butter. Tomato chutneys, onion chutneys, tomato and onion chutneys, garlic chutneys–both the dry kind we encountered with vada pav earlier this year and sauces that look more like what I think of as a chutney. They all sounded great. There are just too many.

I picked 4 chutneys that I wanted to try. In a marathon Friday evening chutney-making session, I prepared each of them. Then, after seeing a tweet that linked to this ginger chutney recipe, I knew I had to make one more.

New on #TheBackBurner: How to make Andhra-style ginger chutney, one of the oomphiest, punchiest chutneys in existencehttps://t.co/caquqXGdSx

— Pooja Pillai (@Poojaspillai) October 10, 2020

First up was the Goan chutney sandwich. This chutney, light green in color, has as much or more pungent onion flavor as it does mildly sweet coconut flavor. It is brightened by a touch of cilantro but the primary flavors are the hotness of raw onion, garlic, and chili.

The chutney spreads quite a bit more thickly on the bread than the wetter, store-bought chutneys I was using previously, and has a far more aggressive flavor. The bread does tame it somewhat, though, and after the initial shock of flavor wears off, a lingering milder coconut flavor joins those more powerful flavors on the palate.

If I were to make this again, I’d cut the onion in half and increase the cilantro as a matter of personal preference. It is a good condiment though and could be really effective at adding a lot of flavor to a relatively plain starchy base like rice or potatoes. Or, I suppose, bread, which is what it’s doing here.

The tomato and onion chutney–aromatic from a tempering of mustard seeds and curry leaf (I did eventually pick some up), spicy and savory and just the tiniest bit sweet from my garden-ripe tomatoes all at once. I wasn’t sure, though, whether it would carry a sandwich all by itself. Then I thought of

Amul, that god among processed cheeses–sharp, salty, melty, and with an ever-so-slight sour funky edge. A matrix of tiny shreds of Amul cheese would help sop up the wet tomato chutney and cradle that sauce in its lactic lattice.

A perfect plan, impossible to improve upon. Unless. unless, I were to make a cheese sandwich with Amul and tomato chutney, then heat it up in a pan, melting the cheese and heating the chutney into a gooey gradient. Why, it would be almost like having a grilled cheese sandwich with tomato soup all in one!

It was exactly like that. The saltiness of the Amul cheese helped pick up and pick out the individual flavors of onion and tomato and spices in the chutney, while the slight acidity of the hot and savory chutney helped cut the fattiness of the cheese. All of this, in a convenient and crispy carrying case. What a fantastic sandwich, what a fantastic idea for a sandwich, if I do say so myself.

When I’d seen the groundnut chutney, and had realized that it was essentially ground, roasted peanuts with spices, I immediately started looking for an authentically Indian sweet chutney I could make, for the sole purpose of this dumb idea:

I combined the groundnut chutney–which, it turns out, is not very much like peanut butter at all, except that it consists mainly of toasted peanuts ground into a paste–with a sweet mango chutney–which is not terribly sweet, and is more like a mostarda than a jam or preserves–to make a somewhat misguided attempt at an Indian PBJ.

The funny thing is though that it worked. Not in the sense that I made something like a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, except only in the most broad interpretation possible. But the toasty and aromatic groundnut chutney, redolent of its tempering with mustard seeds, curry leaves, chilies, and garlic, just worked really nicely with the bright sweet/sourness of the mango, the rich caramel of the jaggery, the slight earthy pungency of the turmeric, and its matching mustard seed tempering.

Soon there was only one chutney remaining, one that must stand alone, the ginger chutney. In her tweet describing it, the recipe’s author called it “one of the oomphiest, punchiest chutneys in existence.” I’ve now tasted it and I believe her. The recipe takes a fairly sizable base of chopped fresh ginger–zesty, bordering on hot, an extremely strong flavor in any sense–adds sweet and sour elements to it with jaggery and tamarind, amps up the heat with chili peppers, and adds toasty and almost maple-syrup like aromatics to it with curry leaf, toasted lentils, and toasted fenugreek seeds. The resulting chutney is… well, a very thin schmear does the trick.

If there is one recipe from this post I can almost guarantee I’ll make again, it is this ginger chutney. It is addictive. Hot, so spicy, but not a gratuitous heat–it earns this level of heat with the sheer force of flavor that accompanies it. A tiny tip of a spoonful is enough to start your entire head ringing, turn your face red, maybe even make you sneeze. Not due to capsaicin alone, though. The ginger phenols, the different aromatic compounds created when toasting mustard seeds, fenugreek seeds, legumes, the acidity of the tamarind, the sweetness of the jaggery, all combine to overwhelm even the chili heat.

It’s a pretty thin layer of chutney. But it’s just right. This was my favorite sandwich of the day. I have more of them in my future. I even have another Indian sandwich to cover this month, so hopefully I can use a few of these chutneys to enhance it. I barely covered the tiniest corner of Indian chutneys, and I know that many of the sandwiches I made reflect more of my own ideas what to do with these incredible flavors than what the people whose flavors they are do with them. I’d love to hear about all your favorite chutneys, whether they have anything to do with sandwiches or not. Please leave a comment below and tell the Tribunal what kind of chutneys you like!