Like most vegetables, you will need to wash the luffa properly. After that you start peeling off the vegetable’s soft, thin skin and cut off a small piece from both sides. Torai comes in all sizes. I would recommend cutting the bigger ones into finger-long pieces to make the preparation easier. Now all is left to do with these pieces of vegetable is to make a deep cut into the side of each of them where you will later fill the spices in.

For preparing these, you need a small bowl into which you add coriander, mango powder, turmeric and garam masala. Slowly add the water and mix the spices until it is a whole nice paste which will be your filling.

It is best to straight away prepare the tomatoes, too. For this you put a pot with water for boiling and place the tomatoes into it. After some minutes their skin starts cracking and you can take them out. Now it is easy to peel off the skin. Put them into a blender without their skin and make tomato puree out of it.

Now we will start with the cooking process. Heat up a pan, add one tablespoon olive oil and once that is hot, add the cumin seeds. When the cumin seeds start sizzling in your pan, you need to churn them a bit. In this way they won’t burn. Once they have filled your kitchen with their great aroma, you can add the spice paste and fry it nicely from all sides. Some of the water may come out but don’t worry, just keep on churning and it will partly evaporate and partly be soaked up by the spices again. After a few minutes, the paste will become a bit golden which is the sign that it is ready to be taken out onto a plate.

In the next step, the luffa will be filled with the spice paste. Take a vegetable piece, hold it in one hand and either take a spoon or your fingers of the other hand to stuff the paste into the cut. Stuff all pieces in this way.

In the end you have to heat up the second tablespoon of oil in a frying pan. On low heat you will now fry the torai. Place them one by one into the pan and then keep on turning them carefully so that the filling does not fall out but the vegetable gets soft until the inside. After about ten minutes your vegetables will be ready.

Place another pot onto the stove, add the tomato puree and heat it up with a little bit of salt. Once it is warm, you can put the torai pieces into it and also add whatever spices have fallen out of the filling while frying.

And that is it already: delicious Bharwa Torai in Tomato Sauce!