Put Dabeli in Mah Belly

From the Tribunal’s beginning, there’s a certain type of sandwich that has been sure to get a negative reaction from me: the dreaded carb-on-carb sandwich. From Yakisoba Pan to Spaghetti Sandwich, from Korokke Pan to Broodje Kroket, from Mexico’s Guajolota to Chicago’s own Mother-In-Law, and especially, especially the dreaded Chip Butty, there is no type of sandwich more sure to get me complaining than one of these black holes of flavor. Rather than a flavorful filling enhancing an edible bread handle, they are just carbs on top of more carbs, flavorless and dull.

There are exceptions though. Thank you, India, for your continuing commitment to layers upon layers of flavor.

My local Indian market, Swagat Foods in Oak Forest, Illinois, is just a couple miles from my house and is where I do the majority of my spice shopping. Typically they’ll have a collection of prepared foods sitting either at room temperature on the checkout counter or in a small cooler nearby. These foods might, on any given day, include a number of carb-on-carb items that I can’t get enough of. I invariably leave the place with a snack or several.

Samosas, for example, are spicy mix of potatoes and peas wrapped in a pie-like crust. This is a fistful of flavor, and even without any chutneys it makes for a fantastic snack. With a little of the sweet tamarind chutney and the spicy green chili chutney to dip them in, they are next-level. It may not be a sandwich but potatoes wrapped in pie crust? That’s carb-on-carb. Also, sometimes people do wrap them in bread to eat them.

Bread Pakora is a potato sandwich essentially–bread filled with a spicy and savory potato mixture, coated with chickpea batter and deep-fried. By the time they’ve been sitting out at room temperature for a bit, the textural pleasures you’d expect of a deep-fried item are mostly gone but these are still fantastically tasty.

We wrote about vada pav back in January, a chickpea-battered potato fritter stuffed in a bread roll and seasoned with chutney. These are sometimes available on the counter at Swagat but not often–they sell out quickly because they’re just that good.

Pav bhaji, one of my absolute favorite things to eat, is a spicy potato and vegetable stew that is served with pav, Indian bread rolls that look somewhat like a basic dinner roll. The rolls are used to scoop up the stew, which has a good amount of chili heat in addition to a masala combining aromatic spices–coriander, cardamom, cumin, fennel, cinnamon, and clove, among others.

My favorite, though, my absolute favorite snack to get from Swagat is their Dabeli.

The dabeli at Swagat come packed individually in a simple plastic clamshell. When I first started buying them there, they came wrapped in aluminum foil. Regardless of the wrapper, what’s inside is a simple bread roll, possibly a hamburger bun, spread with chutney and stuffed with a sweet and aromatic and spicy mix of potatoes.

It doesn’t look like much. Here’s a cross section.

That potato mixture is topped with peanuts, onions, and once-crispy little chickpea flour noodles called sev. Sometimes you’ll even see pomegranate pips in there.

I’ve gotten them at other places. Kamdar Plaza on Devon does a fine version, absolutely overstuffed with the sweet potato mixture, with a bright red chili-and-garlic chutney that is typical of the sandwich in the Kutch district of Gujarat where it originated.

Some of my other “usual suspects” for vegetarian Indian sandwiches also make fine versions. The dabeli at Gujju’s Chaat House in Naperville comes in a good-sized roll with the square shape typical of a pav, cut open but still hinged on one side, absolutely bursting with the sweet and spicy mashed potatoes.

The sandwich is dressed with sev, peanuts, and red onions, red garlic chutney.

The potato mixture also contained some dark sweet fruit bits that I could not identify–dates maybe? The potato mixture itself is sweet, which lends itself to fruit additions such as this or my preferred pomegranate, and the spiciness also works well with the pungent onions.

Mumbai Cafe also sells a dabeli which, like their vada pav, comes on a pair of smaller pavs with nicely done grill marks.

The potato mixture is thicker, darker, dryer than others I’ve had. The chili garlic chutney is quite nice but this particular sandwich appears to have been assembled a little hastily, sloppily. I know that Mumbai cafe does a nice job in general though and I’ll be back to try something else one day. I also must thank them for correcting my pronunciation of the snack from the improper rhymes-with-wobbly way I’d been saying it, thus altering the title of this post.

Having a freshly-made, crisp, warm dabeli is quite a different experience than eating one that’s been sitting in a plastic box all day. Still, that simple snack from Swagat is my favorite, my ideal version of the dabeli.

Until this month.

Post-Thanksgiving Leftovers Ratio Blues

Normally, the first few days after Thanksgiving are filled with a frenzy of inventive methods for eating leftover turkey, stuffing, mashed potatoes and gravy. The sandwiches. The fry-ups. That late-night too-loud microwave beep. There’s always too much food at Thanksgiving; it’s a given. But if things have gone well, the leftovers will disappear in due course and you won’t be left asking yourself a question like “What am I going to do with several pounds of mashed potatoes?

Fortunately for me, the answer to that this year became obvious when Swagat Foods made it easy for me.

This packet contains enough dabeli masala–including “clove, cinnamon, coriander, cumin, chillies, coconut, badiyan (star anise), elaichi (green cardamom), turmeric, tejpatta (bay leaf), sugar, citric acid, black pepper, edible oil, etc.” according to the ingredient list–for 1 kilogram of potatoes, most of what I had left at that point.

Of course I had more ingredients to acquire. The masala packet may have taken care of the spices but I still needed sev, the tiny little crisp chickpea noodles so often used in Indian snack foods. Additionally, the recipes that I quickly read on my phone while shopping called for both a “sweet chutney” and a “lehsun ki” chutney. I was able to determine that the sweet chutney probably referred to date or date/tamarind chutney in this particular case, and that the lehsun ki chutney was the fiery red garlic and chili chutney I’d encountered on a few of the restaurant versions of the sandwich I’d tried.

I would also need pav, the bread rolls used in so much of India’s delicious street food. Swagat Foods does sell a fine version of pav made by a local bakery but I felt like flexing my baking muscles here and made these beauties, using the Sifted Artisanal flour from Janie’s Mill and a recipe that made the right amount for the 9×13″ pan I wanted to use. They turned out terrific, fluffy but denser than a dinner roll, with a springy texture that holds its shape well.

The instructions on the masala packet read as follows:

Take 1 Kb. of Potato/Banana Boil, Peel & Cut into pieces. Heat 200g Peanut oil, put Potato/Banana Pieces. Stir & put Davda Dabeli Masala into oil & stir well. Now Tasty Kutchi Dabeli Vegetable is ready

Many recipes online call for plating the potato mixture and topping it on the plate with the sev, peanuts, onions, additional shredded coconut, pomegranate, or whatever you are going to use in the sandwich. That makes sense, as it having those elements integrated into the potato mixture would keep them from falling out once you put them in the sandwich. However, it would not photograph as well so I refrained. I did go so far as to mix in some chopped cilantro.

To assemble, I put a pav onto a lightly oiled pan over low heat

I cut it open, leaving one edge connected, and spread the garlic/chili chutney on the bottom half of the bun

Atop the chutney, I placed a good amount of the potato mixture. Probably too much, to be honest, but hey, it was my first time making one of these.

Then I added a generous sprinkling of sev

and smushed the peanuts, onions, and pomegranate pips down into the potatoes to try to get them to stick. The top bun got a schmear of date chutney.

And that is a dabeli.

Of course as soon as I tried to move it, I realized the filling had squished out the side and had to push it back into place with the back of a spoon and, honestly, my fingers. So it was not quite as pretty once it got to my marble cutting board.

It was delicious, though. Warming spices like cinnamon and clove are often used in savory dishes in Indian cuisine but are more familiar to American palates in sweet applications, namely pies. This potato mixture isn’t quite as sweet as a pie but the masala feels very familiar, comfortable, even seasonal as a result. Straddling the line between sweet and savory as this dish does, the disparate garnishes–peanuts, onions, pomegranate, crispy chickpea noodles–feel natural and right as well.

I have not fully been converted to the church of homemade dabeli. This itch is just too easy to scratch by picking up a plastic clamshell or two while checking out at a store I frequent regularly. But I will definitely keep this possibility in mind if I ever end up with too much mashed potatoes again in the future.