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Alu Tamatarwale

A spiced potato and tomato sauce cooked with mustard seeds, cumin, ginger, green chillies, and tomato paste.

From the Recipes Wiki (Fandom) · 11 ingredients
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Why it works: Cumin and asafoetida work together. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and 101 recipes mention both. Both carry beta-phellandrene, which smells minty, terpene. The science ↓

The recipe

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Heat oil in a non-stick pan and add asafoetida powder, cumin seeds and mustard seeds. Once they begin to sizzle, add in chopped ginger and green chillies.

  2. Add chili powder, turmeric powder and tomato paste, and cook for a few minutes till the paste softens and oil starts to form on top.

  3. Throw in the potatoes and sprinkle salt, and mix thoroughly to evenly coat the potatoes with the sauce.

Recipe from the Recipes Wiki (Fandom).

This recipe comes from the Recipes Wiki on Fandom and is licensed CC BY-SA 4.0. Our formatting and summaries are shared under the same licence.

Steps grouped into stages for easier reading; the method is the source's own.

Explore the science

The flavor team

The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much aroma chemistry they share, and how many recipes mention both.

  1. Cumin + asafoetidatop 3% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapmoderate
    Mentioned together101 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  2. Cumin + turmerictop 1% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapstrong
    Mentioned together1,698 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  3. Ginger + turmerictop 1% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapstrong
    Mentioned together2,775 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  4. Cumin + tomatotop 2% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapmoderate
    Mentioned together3,272 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  5. Cumin + gingertop 2% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapstrong
    Mentioned together1,733 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Potatoes
Form the bulk of the dish and absorb the spiced tomato sauce.
Tomato paste
Provides concentrated tomato flavour, colour and body to the sauce as it cooks down with oil.
Mustard seeds
Release a nutty, pungent aroma when fried in hot oil at the start.
Cumin seeds
Bloom in hot oil to release a warm, earthy aroma that flavours the base.
Ginger
Adds a pungent, fresh aroma to the spiced oil base.

The step that matters

Cooking the tomato paste in oil. Cooking the paste for a few minutes until oil separates lets its raw, sharp taste mellow and deepen. Stopping early leaves the sauce tasting raw and acidic.

Flavor stand-ins for the mustard

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (potato, cumin, ginger, asafoetida, tomato, turmeric):

  1. Carrotbetter flavor fit
  2. Capsicumbetter flavor fit
  3. Spinachbetter flavor fit
  4. Mustardthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against potato, cumin, ginger, asafoetida, tomato, turmeric. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes. This compares flavor only: it does not check the job the ingredient does in the dish (bulk, moisture, acidity, structure).

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.

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