Boondi Raita - Yoghurt Sauce with Chickpea Balls

A cool yoghurt sauce with the extra kick of small chickpea balls in it – a side dish for a complete meal or just with bread!

How to make Boondi Raita

There is the possibility to buy ready-made boondi in different flavours in an Asian market or Indian store. This will obviously reduce both work and time noticeably but of course there is a different taste to anything that you make yourself at home.

Mix the chickpea flour with the water which is meant for this purpose and make a nice and rather liquid paste. There should not be any dry chickpea flour accumulated anywhere in the paste, it should be fully homogenous.

Heat up some oil for frying in a wok or deep pot. For checking, whether the oil is hot, you can let a tiny bit of the paste drop into the fat and see whether it starts sizzling. If it does, your oil is hot enough and you can turn down the stove to medium heat.

Take a skimmer, hold it above the oil, the handle resting on the side of your pot or wok. Take a ladle and fill it with the paste which you then give on top of the skimmer. Obviously this is easier if you have a second person to hold it for you but it can be done alone as well. Once the paste is on the skimmer, lift and lower it in quick movements, lightly hitting the skimmer to the side of the pot so that drops of paste start falling out of the skimmer holes into the fat and start sizzling there.

Once the pot or wok is quite full with boondi drops, take a cooking spoon and stir so that they get evenly deep-fried from all sides. Keeping on stirring will prevent them from sticking to each other. Once they are crunchy, after about 2 minutes, they will pop up to the surface and you can take them out. You can place them into a fine sieve so that their oil can drip out and they can cool down.

While they get cold, you can prepare the yoghurt. Mix the water and the yoghurt together in a bowl and use a hand blender to make it slightly foamy. Now you need to take the cumin seeds, heat up a small pan on the stove and give the cumin into it without any fat. Let the seeds roast until they have filled your kitchen with their beautiful smell and have turned a dark brown. Take them out and grind them in a mortar to roasted cumin powder which you then add into the yoghurt. You can keep a pinch of the powder aside for decoration purpose. Add the black salt and regular salt and mix the sauce well.

The last bit before we get back to the boondi is to wash and pick the coriander leaves. Cut them in small pieces and mix them into the yoghurt sauce, keeping a few leaves out for decoration, if needed.

Once the boondi are cool, you take a bowl of lukewarm water and soak them for one to two minutes in this water. They will release some of the oil of deep-frying and get soft. Take them out and either squeeze them with the hands or in a fine cotton cloth so that most of the water comes out. Be careful though not to destroy the formed balls – so don’t squeeze too hard!

Finally you can put them into the yoghurt sauce! Mix with a spoon or ladle, spread a bit of cumin powder on top of it, place a coriander leaf on top and serve your Boondi Raita!