Aloo matar (potato and pea curry) is a classic comfort food and one of my favourite vegetable curries. This straightforward one-pot dish is a filling meal that you can eat for breakfast, lunch, and dinner!

As with many other curries, it pairs beautifully with toast, flatbread and rice.

What is Aloo Matar?

Aloo matar is a meal of potatoes and peas that can be served dry or in a seasoned shorba (soup). For this recipe, I learned how to cook aloo matar with shorba.

While this particular curry may seem like a two-ingredient dish, its rich flavour comes from the abundance of vegetables and spices present in the masala (spice mix).

These typically include onions, garlic, ginger, and tomatoes, with spices such as red chilli, coriander, turmeric, and cumin. Different recipes may exclude some ingredients and add others, depending on preference.

All ingredients required for aloo matar (sliced yellow onions, garlic and ginger, spices, water, peas, fenugreek, coriander, green chilli peppers, tinned tomatoes, sunflower oil, and chopped potatoes) — All ingredients (sliced yellow onions, garlic and ginger, spices, water, peas, fenugreek, coriander, green chilli peppers, tinned tomatoes, sunflower oil, and chopped potatoes)

To make aloo matar, we start by preparing the masala, which is the flavourful base of the curry. Once the masala is ready, we add water to form the shorba.

Finally, we add our potatoes and peas. Then we cover the pot and allow the curry to cook until the potatoes are moderately soft.

We usually want the masala to be smooth so that its flavour assimilates well in the shorba and to ensure that the shorba isn’t lumpy.

You can achieve this either by crushing the ingredients with a food masher or by puréeing them using an immersion blender, before adding water. For this recipe, I’ll be using an immersion blender.

How I Learned to Cook Aloo Matar

Preparation

First, I peeled the potatoes and chopped them into medium-size cubes.

I soaked them in cold water to slow down the oxidation process that gives the potato cubes a pink tinge over time.

Once done, I peeled and sliced the onions.

Making the Masala

I then fried the onions in half a cup of oil on medium heat until they turned light brown.

Light brown fried onions — Fry onions until light brown

Then I added the garlic and ginger cubes and allowed them to cook for 1-2 minutes.

After that, I mixed in the tomatoes. I used tinned tomatoes for this recipe.

I then added salt, chilli powder, turmeric powder, ground cumin, and ground coriander, and mixed them together with the masala.

Masala for aloo matar (potato and pea curry) — Masala

Using an immersion blender, I blended the masala to give it a smoother texture.

At this stage, the masala was a little too thick, so I added a splash of water.

Masala after it is blended using immersion blender

Cooking the Potatoes and Peas

Once the masala was done, I added the chopped potatoes and peas to the pot and mixed them with the masala.

I then added a handful of fresh coriander leaves, fenugreek, and a couple of green chilli peppers with 800ml of water.

Adding water, fenugreek, coriander, and green chilli peppers to potatoes and peas

Finally, I covered the pot and kept it on low heat until the potatoes were cooked. This is when the potatoes are soft and have no bite, but are not mushy (around 40 minutes for me).

Aloo matar (potato and pea curry) when ready

What Has Aloo Matar Taught Me?

Having recently learned how to make whole masoor dal for my first lentil dish, I decided that aloo matar would be my first vegetable dish.

The process was not difficult at all- after all, aloo matar is a one-pot recipe that uses most of the same spices as dal. The most notable differences were the increase in ingredients used for the masala and, of course, the absence of the pressure cooker.

The trickiest part of practising aloo matar was getting the timing of the potatoes right. I needed to make sure that they were the right texture- not too soft and not too hard.

I also found that the proportions of spices were slightly different to those of dal, so I made adjustments.

To improve this recipe for next time, I will be repeating it using fresh garlic, ginger, and tomatoes.