Sauté potatoes, spinach, and tomatoes with Indian spices (aka saag aloo)

One of the marvelous spicy Indian delights in this world, where three heroes (potato, spinach, and tomato) are set on a quest to conquer your palate, with a supporting team of spices and condiments.

This recipe is heavily inspired by this one from Mallika Basu. Although I changed it slightly, I wouldn’t have created this recipe if Mallika hadn’t shared hers first. While I checked her Website, I discovered Mallika has now a Substack newsletter: More Than Curry.

Serves: 4

Preparation: 30 minutes

Cooking: 50 minutes

The cooked dish, served in a light pink bowl (color doesn’t matter much) - CC BY-NC-SA 4.0

The first contact I had with Indian cuisine brings me back around 2012. We were living our last year according to interpretations of the Mayan calendar, scientists had finally discovered the Higgs boson, London was hosting the Summer Olympics, Curiosity had landed on Mars, and the world was dancing funny on Psy’s Gangnam Style. More important: my future wife brought me left-overs from her lunch at an Indian restaurant. It was an epiphany: colors, smells, textures, flavors… everything was incredibly right. How had I stayed away from such delights for so long? I visited this restaurant, others (Indian, Nepalese, Bhutanese), and started to cook dishes myself. Very soon, I had caught up on Indian cuisine, and this is one of my favorites in the world — despite the long time recipes take to cook.

The vegetarian menu (I was vegetarian back in those days) at this restaurant featured several dishes, including one which perfectly paired sauté potatoes and spinach: saag aloo. Several years further, I mentioned saag aloo to Indian team members, and only few knew about it. From the first Web search results, pointing to BBC Good Food, I thought it was something originating from the United Kingdom (like chicken tikka masala). Wikipedia to the rescue! Saag is a common dish in different Indian states — and India being such a large country, not all my team members could know about it. I searched how to prepare this dish, sharpened my skills, and gradually refined my recipe, which I share with you today.

About spinach

Baby spinach leaves - - CC BY-NC-SA 4.0

The recipe is named saag aloo, however saag refers to leafy greens at large. They can be spinach, mustard leaves, collard greens, or others. Long story short, the most common one in my area is spinach, so I go with it.

Children rarely like spinach, and I made no exception. However, spinach is low in calories (23 kcal for 100 g) and a good source of nutrients. Although Popeye the sailor man cartoon conveyed the idea that spinach makes you strong because it’s high in iron and calcium, it contains oxalates which hinders the absorption of both, in the stomach and small intestine. Cooked spinach in several changes of water has lower levels of oxalates, however the present recipe doesn’t do so; as a consequence, you cannot lure someone into eating saag aloo for the intake of iron and calcium. Good news: you only need them to taste it, and they’ll happily finish their plate — note this hasn’t been tested on children (yet).

Ingredients

Main ingredients for the recipe - CC BY-NC-SA 4.0

Additional ingredients for the recipe; they did not all fit on the platter - CC BY-NC-SA 4.0

• 4 potatoes ~ 620 g

• 450 g fresh baby spinach leaves

• 400 g canned peeled tomatoes

• 7 garlic cloves ~ 20 g

• 5 green chili peppers ~ 120 g

• 2 soup spoons of garam masala

• 1 soup spoon of cumin seeds

• 2 soup spoons of cumin powder

• 4 soup spoons of coriander powder

• 20 g fresh coriander

• 2 soup spoons of garlic ginger paste

• 2 soup spoons of lemon juice

• 15 g Himalayan pink gem salt

• 5-6 soup spoons of sunflower oil

Preparation

This recipe will require you wash, peel, chop, slice a lot of the ingredients — pretty much all of them, actually. This takes a while, so consider completing all the preparation steps before even heating your wok or deep pan.

1. Wash spinach leaves, cut in 2-3 millimeters pieces, slicing in the width of the leaves

2. Wash the fresh coriander, then chop it (both leaves and stems)

3. Wash green chili peppers, remove the end where they were attached to the plant, then cut into 0.5 cm wide slices

4. Peel the garlic cloves, chop into thumbnail-sized pieces

5. Peel the potatoes, then dice them in thumb-sized pieces (don’t cut them too small, or you’ll end up with mashed potatoes)

Main ingredients for the recipe, after preparation - CC BY-NC-SA 4.0

Cooking

I relied a large non-stick wok I don’t get to use often. My rationale for a wok is that it will be handy to stir, and mix evenly ingredients added to present ones (for example, at step 13). Also, it gives room to the baby spinach leaves before they heat and shrink. My rationale for a non-stick cookware is that it will allow to sauté the potatoes with little oil, and prevents them from sticking (hence the name). Although you don’t have to act quickly, the preparation of the spinach leaves is awfully long (though it’s rewarding). Complete all Preparation steps before proceeding with the below ones.

1. Heat the wok to medium flame/power

2. Add 4 soup spoons of oil, wait for it to heat

3. Add potato dice, stir so they’re oiled on all sides; cover for 5 minutes

4. Stir once, then cover again for 5 to 10 minutes — until the dice start to be grilled on the side in contact with the bottom of the wok

5. Remove potato dice, reserve for later

6. Add 1 to 2 soup spoons of oil, wait for it to heat

7. Add chopped garlic and sliced chili peppers; stir gently for 2 minutes

8. Add cumin seeds, ground cumin, and ground coriander; lower the heat to a third of the maximum flame/power

9. Add chopped baby spinach leaves, mix carefully (not to spill oil out of the wok)

10. Add the garlic-ginger paste, mix — you should already notice the spinach leaves starting to shrink and release water

11. Cover, cook for 15 minutes

12. Return the heat to medium flame/power

13. Add the potato dice, tomatoes, and salt; mix evenly for 5 minutes

14. Add lemon juice and garam masala; stir

15. Stop heating; let the spinach to cool down a bit before adding chopped fresh coriander, or use it as topping when serving

Cumin seeds, ground cumin, sliced green chili peppers, ground coriander, garlic (step 8) - CC BY-NC-SA 4.0

You can serve this right away, just remember to let it covered between the moment you finish cooking and the time you serve it. Serve with basmati rice, either separately in the plate, or with the saag aloo on top of the rice; the spiced liquid from the saag aloo will flow on the rice and give it a unique touch. To make your meal larger, or to serve more guests, you can complete your table with a dal (like my simple red lentils and cauliflower soup with tandoori spices (aka gōbhī and masoor tandoori dal)).

This dish freezes well, however cooked potatoes always suffer from unfreezing. Consider leaving the frozen saag aloo at room temperature for 2 hours, then re-heating it gently, covered, in a pot. If you cook a batch of saag aloo mainly to freeze it for later, you can undercook the potatoes, so they’ll finish cooking when re-heating the dish.

The dish, once finished cooking, sprinkled with garam masala (step 14), still in the non-stick wok- CC BY-NC-SA 4.0

Enjoy!

If you’ve tried the recipe, and would like to comment - whether you loved it, or hated it - please do so. I’m welcoming ideas, even if these are non-vegan recipes I’ll have the challenge to “veganize”.

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Here’s a tip before you go

Using baby spinach leaves instead of a can of chopped spinach is a conscious choice: the one of taste. However, washing, then slicing the baby spinach leaves can take a lot of your valuable time — which is best spent reading my articles, right? By the way, I’m using canned peeled tomatoes also on purpose. This is because canned peeled tomatoes come with more juice than what fresh tomatoes contain, and it’s important to add more savory liquid for this recipe.

Back to the baby spinach leaves. First, to wash all the leaves at once, I open the plastic bag on one side and pour water in, then out. I repeat the operation until I see clear water running out. Be cautious the weight of the water can break the bag, so hold it from above and below at once.

Second, to slice many leaves at once, I simply stack them up, and use a good knife. If you cook often, and need to cut, slice, and so on, indulge yourself great utensils, you’ll save time and increase your please when cooking. I, for example, worship my santoku bōchō / 三徳包丁.

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