Gluten-Free Samosas and Naan

For health reason, my husband and I have been gluten-free for more than a decade.

We also decided this year that we're not comfortable eating mammals. Fish and birds are on the menu, but beef, pork, lamb and goat, staples of many Indian restaurants are off the table.

But when we conspired with our friend N. about her wife G.'s birthday, we found out that what she would really like was good Indian food.

So we made her a feast.

We would have bought gluten-free samosas and naan if there were any options, but we couldn't find any.

So we scoured the web for recipes and decided to do it ourselves.

The main dish was easy. Korma with chicken and sweet potatoes is a pretty standard dish and easy peasy.

But samosas and naan require bread and that's never easy when you are gluten-free.

We started by making the filing for the samosas. This is mostly curried potatoes with some peas and a little bit of ground turkey. Peeling, chopping and boiling the potatoes was the hardest part.

While the filling was cooling, we got to work on the shells.

A good puff pastry is nearly impossible without gluten, but we found that tortillas make a great substitute.

We love Mission gluten-free tortillas. They are the next best thing to flour tortillas made with white flour. But they are a bit more prone to crumbling. We warmed them in the microwave, swathed in paper towels, for about 10 seconds.

Then, they get cut in half and folded into triangular pockets. We used a flour paste, 2 tablespoons of King Arthur's Gluten-Free Flour to 3 tablespoons of water.

Next, you fill the shell with stuffing. You can use the past to seal the top edge when you're done, but we found the potato mixture also sealed it pretty well.

The filled samosas get stuck on a parchment covered cookie sheet, sprayed with cooking spray and baked for 15 minutes at 400 degrees. The recipe said for half an hour, but we found that ours were done in 15 minutes.

We made these the day before our big feast and they rewarmed remarkably well. Just put them back in the over for that last 15 minutes.

Though not exactly Indian food, we had heard that the birthday woman also enjoyed baba ganoush, And it's a quick and easy appetizer with no modifications needed to make it gluten-free.

We roasted the eggplants while the naan was rising. About an hour in the oven is all it takes! Then we scooped out the shells and left the eggplant in sieve-style colander for about half an hour to drain out the extra moisture.

Tahini, olive oil and spice, mostly salt and garlic finish out the dish. We like to add smoked paprika and a little bit of lemon juice to get the flavor just right. This recipe is epic.

Once the baba ganoush was mixed and in the fridge it was time to roll out the naan.

If you've never tried to use gluten-free flour to make a yeast bread, be prepared for the disappointment. The part of flour that makes all those pretty bubbles with yeast and causes bread to rise is the gluten. Without it, even with fast-rising yeast and binders like cream of tartar and xantham gum, your gluten-free bread is never going to be the soft squishy white bread we all know and love.

That said, this recipe works pretty darn well. The dough is more sticky than traditional bread dough, but you can handle it easily. The recipe calls for rolling out the dough into 3/8" thick sections, but we found that we could pat it down thinner than that with just our hands. We went close to 1/4" thick.

We used organic coconut oil to fry the first batch and while it didn't have the large bubble spots I associate with regular naan, it was a delicious flat bread. We immediately started talking about other uses for this recipe. It would make great flatbreads and a pretty awesome chewy pizza crust.

For the second, batch we decided to try to be even healthier and instead of frying it, put the individual bread patties on a cookie sheet covered with parchment paper. We sprayed them with avocado oil and baked them for about 20 minutes at 400 degrees.

They were a bit drier, as you might expect, but also had about 60 fewer calories per piece. When it came time to reheat them for the feast, they both reheated well and were excellent for dipping in the baba ganoush or soaking up the extra korma sauce.

Our main dish was a chicken and sweet potato korma made primarily in the crockpot.

Kormas are an easy entry into making homemade Indian food. Generally, you have a starch, a protein, coconut milk and curry spices. A lot of recipes will call for the individual spices, including things like gram masala that many people might not have. To make the jump easier, find a premade curry blend. We have a yellow curry blend that we found at a local Indian grocer.

Don't be afraid to try different curries. Even yellow curry blends will often vary greatly from manufacturer to manufacturer. Or, if you don't trust your skills, you can buy the plethora of spice to make your own.

At this point, I start most things with a tablespoon of the yellow curry mix and then add more curry and other spices as necessary. Typically, I'm adding garlic, ginger, cumin, and red pepper. The recipe I used for this feast also added paprika and chili powder.

The best thing about this homemade gluten-free Indian food feast was that while it took a lot of time, none of it was terribly difficult. All of the pieces could be made the day before and reheated as necessary. And, it proved that I can have Indian food without breaking my gluten-free diet.

You can too!

If you'd like to see more about our gluten-free journey, including cheats and ideas, please let me know. If you loved the ideas here, you can always say thanks with a tip. It would be greatly appreciated!