Potato salad with tamarind, coconut & cashews

September 3, 2023

   

Cindy picked this Meera Sodha recipe out for a friend's potluck picnic - it required just a few tweaks to tick everyone's dietary requirements (we cut the garlic and shallots out of the original), and it promised to be a full-flavoured variation on the bog standard picnic potato salad. I fumbled things a bit in the process - over-boiling my spuds, so the whole thing had less of a fancy potato salad vibe and more of a fancy mashed potato vibe. Luckily, it still tasted great - the curry leaves, tamarind, spices and coconut really elevating things and the cashews adding back some of the texture that I'd boiled away. I'll probably take another crack at this over this summer's picnic season, to see if I can come up with something more like the original photo. 

Potato salad with tamarind, coconut & cashews

(from this recipe on from Meera Sodha's Guardian column)

1kg baby new potatoes

3 tablespoons coconut oil

1 teaspoon black mustard seeds

1 teaspoon cumin seeds

10-15 fresh curry leaves

5 large shallots, peeled and sliced finely (we omitted these for FODMAP reasons)

3 garlic cloves, peeled and crushed (and these)

1 tablespoon of minced ginger

2 green chillies, finely chopped

100g cashews

2-3 teaspoons tamarind paste

200ml coconut milk

salt to taste

Cut the spuds into bite-sized pieces (big ones I'd suggest, maybe just halved) and cook them in boiling water for about 10 minutes, until tender - I chopped mine quite small and so they were falling apart rather than tender by the time I rescued them from the pot. Drain them and put them aside to cool.

Heat the coconut oil in a large frying pan and add the mustard and cumin seeds along with the curry leaves. Once the seeds start to pop a bit, throw in the shallots and cook gently until they soften and start to brown - about 8 minutes. 

Add the garlic, ginger, chillies and cashews, and cook for a couple of minutes, stirring. Put the potatoes and salt in to the frying pan and cook on high for 5 minutes, turning the spuds once (you're trying to get them a bit crispy here, but mine were well and truly losing their structure at this point). 

Stir through the tamarind paste and coconut milk and cook for a few more minutes - the coconut milk is supposed to evaporate and leave everything with a kind of sticky glaze, but my spuds just drank it all up. Serve hot or at room temperature.