This is one of my favourite foods to purchase at the Indian rice restaurant. It is deep fried Indian bitter gourd with spices. Sometimes, it is done so nicely that it mimics chips so much that it is not bitter, really thin and flavourful with spices.
I am doing a healthier version here without the deep frying but using my oven instead. Unfortunately I won’t be able to get rid of the bitter gourd taste since the large amount of oil during deep frying helps to remove the bittergourd.
For my first attempt, it was burnt and too bitter and spice flavour was not strong enough. I didn’t have aluminium foil so I used a parchment paper instead.
For my second attempt, I substituted vinegar with lime, substituted rice flour with all purpose flour, increase spice quantity, sliced the bitter gourd thicker, monitored the oven temperature and watched the oven every 5 minutes. This time I used a newly purchased aluminium foil and the bitter gourd was stuck to it. It took a bit longer to bake as the bitter gourd was thicker and had to turn it over to bake it.
Baked Bitter Gourd Chips
Ingredients
3 bittergourd (540g)
1 tbsp salt
½ tbsp chilli powder
1 tbsp turmeric powder
1 tbsp garam masala
3-5 tbsp all purpose flour
1 tbsp corn starch
1 tbsp lime juice
1 tbsp cooking oil
Method
1. Wash it and sliced it thinly
2. Mix salt and leave it for 15 minutes.
3. Preheat oven to 180C and line baking pan with parchment paper or oil aluminium foil.
4. Pour away brining liquid and mix in chilli powder, turmeric powder, garam masala, all purpose flour, corn starch, lime juice and cooking oil.
5. Bake for 15-25 minutes. Check every 5 minutes from 15 minutes.
