Regarding Sambusas

Author: Ben <benk@tilde.team>

Fri Dec 30 10:49:42 PM +05 2022

If you live somewhere in the world, you probably have heard of this thing called a samosa, which is a classic Indian food item. When I moved to Central Asia, I learned about this other (related) thing called sambusa. You've probably never had one, but it's one of the most delicious things in the universe. They're typically made with meat, but they aren't always; a very popular recipe uses pumpkin instead.

I don't know about other parts of Central Asia, but in Tajikistan and Uzbekistan in particular it's an essential native food item, more or less like a fast food thing but can also be served in formal settings and made at home. (Or can?)

If you search for "sambusa" on Google, the top results are a load of bullshit. It thinks you are searching for samosas, which, while related, are sufficiently different to not be sambusas. (Trust me, I'm an expert.) You have to scroll down pretty far to get to the Wikipedia page on samosas, which does reference the genuine article. For example:

>The English word samosa derives from Hindi word 'samosa' (Hindi: समोसा),[6] traceable to the Middle Persian word sanbosag (سنبوسگ)[7] 'triangular pastry'.[8] Similar pastries are called sambusak in Arabic; Medieval Arabic recipe books sometimes spell it sambusaj.[9]

Next to this result is also a website spreading blatantly false information about the sambusa, claiming it's "samsa" in Tajik, which it most certainly is not. (That is the Uzbek word for it.) In Tajik (another word for "Persian") it is properly "sambusa" and nothing else. By etymology, we can see that it is a native Persian food and was not borrowed from either Indians or Uzbeks, but the other way around. (Like many popular things in India, it has Persian origins.)

The main difference between the Indian samosa and the Persian sambusa is that the Indian version is typically fried. To make the Persian or Central Asian version, you must bake it in an oven. The type of oven matters.

In this part of the world there are these dome-shaped traditional clay ovens that can be found mainly outdoors. They vary in size and can be quite formidable. These ovens are referred to as "tannour" (Anglicized spelling) and are well known in about half the world. (If you're down with South Asian cuisine, you may recognize the word "tandoor").

I won't get too much into how these ovens are used, but you can probably find videos of it on YouTube. (The sambusas or other items like bread are stuck to the inside walls of the oven through a hole in the top.)

Here you basically find two versions of the sambusa: the real one and the fake one. The real one comes straight out of these tannours located anywhere near you, typically on the side of the road, making the sambusa a popular street food. The tannour serves some key purposes like getting the sambusa to be cooked hot enough for it to be safe to eat, delivering it to you with maximum freshness and urgency, and making sure the bread of the sambusa is perfectly crispy while the inside is moist.

The fake sambusas are, unfortunately, also very popular, but trust me, they are bullshit. The difference is the fake ones are cooked in conventional (modern) ovens and suffer all sorts of issues. They tend not to cook hot enough, the dough used is often disgustingly flaky/oily or just not right somehow. (Too tough, too thick, too soft, too hard...) These bullshit sambusas are usually made at home and also sold by bakeries, restaurants, and grocery stores, and they probably sat out for like a day, making them possibly unsanitary if they were even properly cooked to begin with. The insides are also a bit different and just not as tasty.

Needless to say, you are going to want the real ones, although if you are vegetarian then actually the pumpkin ones (for some reason) are always the conventional oven type, whereas the "real" sambusa is pretty much exclusively made with meat.

And they don't just contain meat; the insides are a combination of chunks of meat, chopped onion, and chunks of animal fat (and cumin, I guess). What makes this food perfect is that it is crunchy, juicy, savory, salty, and gives you enough protein, carbs, salt, and fat to be "highly palatable". (Like sushi!) They're best eaten with a sauce that completes the flavor profile (flavor overload?) by adding things like spiciness (if you like hot sauce), sourness (street vendors often offer vinegar with sambusas), and sweetness, because of course the only thing missing here is sugar. However, it is not traditional and abnormal among locals to use a sweet sauce, and spicy sauces are uncommon, although you could probably find some place serving them with a mildly hot salsa of some sort.

Being the American that I am, my instinct was to try them with Heinz ketchup. That was a good idea because you get sweetness and sourness, rounding out the flavor overload nicely. One time at my workplace's cafetaria we were served sambusas, and I specifically requested ketchup to put on them. My coworkers were surprised and curious about what I was doing, but when they found out they all wanted to do the same. (It wasn't even real ketchup but some locally manufactured weaksauce.)

Anyway, that's all about sambusas. I feel like I eat them too often, although in reality I'm lucky if I have them once a week. They are something like the region's version of the hamburger.