Restaurant-Style North Indian Dum Aloo Recipe

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North Indian Dum Aloo Recipe

Aloo Dum is truly a classic! It is a vegetarian curry that originates from the region of Kashmir. There is a North Indian restaurant style version of this recipe, along with homestyle versions, and I love both very much! We’ll be making dum aloo restaurant style here.

Let’s begin by explaining what the dish means. “Aloo” translates to potatoes, and “dum” translates to the cooking method used for these potatoes, which is steaming. So this simply means steamed potatoes! The potatoes are first boiled, then they finish cooking in a lovely and aromatic tomato and onion gravy.

Back in Delhi, I’ve had plenty of variations of this recipe. What I was served at home was much spicier than what is typically served at restaurants. On the other hand, from what I’ve had at restaurants, the gravy is much creamier with less intense spice. Some versions of aloo dum are made with yogurt, some use only ground spices (such as what I’ve had at home), and some use cream. In fact, there are some variations that even have the potatoes stuffed, such as with paneer! I’ll be honest that I don’t particularly enjoy those versions! If you are a major paneer lover, perhaps you may though!

The recipe I’ve developed and will be sharing with you here is a combination of my homestyle recipe and elements from what I’ve had at restaurants. We’ve got the marriage of spices from my homestyle version and the creaminess of the restaurant gravies thanks to the addition of cashews into our tomato gravy! The flavors here are truly incredible, and if you’re looking for a scrumptious potato curry to prepare for you and your family then definitely try this recipe! This restaurant style recipe won’t take you more than 30 minutes to make for a wonderful wholesome dinner tonight!

Tools Needed

• Food processor
• Wok
• Wooden spoon
• Measuring cups
• Lid

Ingredients

• Baby potatoes
• Onion
• Tomatoes
• Ginger
• Garlic
• Ghee
• Cashews
• Cumin seeds
• Bay leaf
• Cinnamon stick
• Green cardamom pod
• Clove
• Hing
• Deggi mirch
• Kitchen King
• Garam masala
• Kasoori methi, or dried fenugreek leaves
• Cilantro, for garnish
• Salt, to taste

How to Make Dum Aloo

1. Begin by adding the ginger, garlic, and onion in a food processor with a bit of water. Purée until everything is well combined.
2. Purée tomatoes in the same blender and set that aside as well.
3. Purée cashews in the same blender with some water until smooth and set aside for later.
4. Heat a wok on medium heat and add ghee. When the wok is hot, add hing, cumin seeds, bay leaf, cinnamon stick, cardamom pods and clove. Cook until the whole spices turn reddish brown and aromatic.
5. Add onion, ginger, garlic puree. Stir well and add deggi mirch and kitchen king masala. Mix well and continue cooking until mixture is dry and reddish brown. Add a splash of water if mixture gets too dry and starts to stick.
6. Add pureed cashews, stir well and continue cooking until mixture is dry. Add a splash of water if mixture gets too dry and starts to stick.
7. Add tomato purée and bring to simmer. Cook with a lid on until the mixture turns redder and becomes dry, about 7-15 minutes. Keep stirring from time to time and add water to prevent masala from burning.
8. Season with salt to taste and add baby potatoes. Stir well, and cook for 2-3 minutes.
9. Add 3-4 cups of water to make a runny gravy. Season with salt and simmer on medium low heat until the gravy starts to thicken.
10. When the gravy is thick, remove the lid and add crushed kasoori methi and garam masala. Garnish with cilantro and serve with hot rice or roti.

Tips & Tricks

• At each stage, make sure to cook the masala well until it has dried out, become fluffy and slides around the pan easily.
• Add water whenever necessary to avoid the masala from getting burnt. This helps ensure a strong, developed flavor in the final gravy.
• Don’t skip roasting the potatoes in the dry masala before adding the gravy. This helps inject the potatoes with a ton of flavor!
• If you are unable to find Deggi Mirch, substitute with paprika. The chili powder used here is used mostly for color and not for spice.

Serving Suggestions

Aloo dum is simply a vegetarian entree. You can serve this with pretty much anything you’d like! For instance, you can serve with any bread, such as:

• Homemade Tandoori Naan
• Homestyle Roti
• Punjabi Laccha Paratha
• Classic Layered Paratha

You can serve with rice, and here are some ideas:

• Basmati Rice
• Jeera Rice
• Healthy Vegetable Pulao

Feel free to pair with your favorite dal, such as Masaledar Chana Dal or serve with some Cucumber Raita! If you eat meat, then you could even enjoy this with a non-vegetarian curry, such as Chicken Tikka Masala!

This Is Not Kashmiri Dum Aloo — and the Potatoes Are Never Fried

Search dum aloo and you land on three different dishes wearing the same name. Kashmiri dum aloo is built on yogurt and dried ginger and traditionally skips onion and garlic altogether. Punjabi dum aloo leans hard on an onion-tomato masala. Garlic dum aloo pushes the garlic to the front. This one is the North Indian restaurant style: a cashew-and-tomato gravy, with no yogurt anywhere in it. If you have made a dum aloo before and remember it tasting tangy and dairy-led, that was a different recipe.

And here is the part that surprises people — the baby potatoes are never fried. Most dum aloo recipes have you deep fry or shallow fry them first to blister the skins. Ours are simply boiled and peeled, a dozen and a half of them, then stirred into the finished masala for two to three minutes so they pick up color and spice before the water goes in. No pan of hot oil, no fried potatoes to drain, no oil left over. You can fry them if you want that texture, but you are then cooking a different dish from this one.

The Whole Spices, and Why They Go In First

The tempering is the entire flavor base and it happens in the first ninety seconds. A tablespoon of ghee goes into a hot wok — a heavy-bottomed one if you have it, because the masala has to fry hard without catching — followed by a pinch of hing, a teaspoon of cumin seeds, one bay leaf, an inch of cinnamon stick, two green cardamom pods and a single clove. You are waiting for those whole spices to turn reddish brown and go aromatic. That smell is the signal, not a timer.

The spice powders come later, and in two waves. Deggi mirch and Kitchen King masala go in with the onion, ginger and garlic puree, and you keep cooking until the mixture is dry and reddish brown and the raw smell of the aromatics has gone completely. Garam masala and crushed kasoori methi are held back to the very end, after the gravy has thickened, so their fragrance survives instead of cooking away. That split between early spices and finishing spices is the difference between a flat curry and a layered one.

What Goes In the Blender, and How Much Water

Three separate purees come out of the same blender jar, and the order matters because it saves you washing it between each. Ginger, garlic and half an onion first, with a splash of water. Then three medium roma tomatoes. Then the cashews — fifteen to twenty of them, soaked in warm water for fifteen minutes so they blend to cream rather than grit. Each puree is set aside and added at a different point, which is why the ingredients list looks longer than the work actually is.

Water is the thing people get wrong. Once the potatoes have had their two to three minutes in the masala, you add three to four cups of water and let the whole pan down to a runny sauce, then simmer on medium low until it thickens back up. It looks like far too much at the time. It is not — that long reduction is where the tomato loses its sharpness and the gravy finds its body, and the tomato stage before it already runs seven to fifteen minutes under a lid. Season with salt twice, once when the potatoes go in and again with the water, because a potato curry salted only at the end always tastes as though the salt is sitting on top rather than inside. Serve it hot with basmati rice, roti or naan.

What “Dum” Actually Means, and What Is Not In This Masala

Dum is a technique before it is a dish name. It means cooking something slowly under a tight lid so the steam has nowhere to go and the ingredients finish in their own moisture — in old restaurant kitchens the lid was sealed on with a rope of dough. You do a version of it here at the tomato stage, when the puree goes in and the pan cooks under a lid for seven to fifteen minutes. It is also why the potatoes want to be properly boiled before they ever meet the masala: boil them until a fork slides in without resistance, then peel them, because a potato still firm in the middle will not soften in a gravy this thick.

It is worth saying plainly what is not in this masala, because the versions you will find elsewhere are full of things this one leaves out. There is no mustard oil — the fat is a tablespoon of ghee. No black cardamom, only green. No fennel, no turmeric powder, and no ready-made ginger garlic paste; the ginger and garlic are fresh and go into the blender with the onion. There is no green chili either, so every bit of the heat comes from two teaspoons of Deggi mirch, which is mild and is really there for color. And it is a stovetop recipe — no Instant Pot, no saute mode, just a wok over medium heat and about thirty-five minutes of cooking. The short list is deliberate. This is a rich curry you would put on the table for festivals and celebrations, and it gets there on a handful of whole spices rather than a cupboard full of powders.

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