SamosaClear

In 60 seconds

1. A dry shell round a wet filling. A samosa is a thin crust of maida dough, crisp and dry on the outside, wrapped round a filling of boiled potato, peas and spices that is still about three-quarters water. Making one is the art of drying the first without drying the second.
2. Moyan makes it khasta. Fat is rubbed into the dry flour before any water goes in. It coats the flour, so water cannot reach all of its protein and little gluten forms. With only about 40 g of water per 100 g of flour, the dough is short and stiff: it fries crisp and flaky instead of puffing like a puri.
3. A semicircle makes a 60° cone. Half a rolled disc is wetted along its straight edge and rolled into a cone. The curved edge, π × R long, becomes the rim, so the mouth's radius is half the slant and the tip angle is about 60°. Dry, cooled filling goes in, and the mouth is pinched shut so no oil gets in and no steam bursts out.
4. Frying is drying. In the oil, water at the surface of the dough boils to steam: the bubbles are steam, not boiling oil. A dry crust grows inwards behind a front that stays at 100 °C, and only that dry crust can brown. Samosas fry slow and low, about 140 °C for about 12 minutes, so the inside cooks before the outside colours. At 180 °C they blister, brown in three minutes and stay raw inside.
5. The oil goes in afterwards. While steam streams out it keeps oil out. Most of the oil a fried food takes up is drawn in after it leaves the kadhai, as the crust cools and the steam in its pores condenses. Oil itself wears out with use: FSSAI's limit is 25% total polar compounds, and its advice is to reheat oil no more than three times.
6. A pastry that travelled. The samosa began as sanbusaj, a fried meat pastry in the cookbooks of 10th-century Baghdad. Ibn Battuta ate it at the Delhi court in the 1330s. The potato filling came centuries later. Today its family runs from Bengal's shingara and Hyderabad's lukhmi to Central Asia's baked samsa and East Africa's sambuus.

Words worth knowing

Term	Meaning
Moyan	Fat rubbed into dry flour before the water is added. It coats the flour and keeps the crust short and crisp.
Gluten	The stretchy network wheat proteins form when wetted and worked. Good for bread, unwanted in a samosa crust.
Short dough	A dough with little gluten because fat has coated the flour. It snaps instead of stretching.
Evaporation front	The boundary inside frying food where water is boiling at 100 °C. Outside it is dry crust; inside it is still wet.
Maillard reaction	The reaction between sugars and amino acids that browns dry food above about 120 °C and makes the fried aroma.
Oil uptake	The oil that ends up in fried food. Most enters during cooling, pulled into the pores the water left.
Smoke point	The temperature at which an oil starts to smoke. It falls as the oil is used.
Total polar compounds	The breakdown products that build up in used frying oil. FSSAI's limit is 25%.
Sanbosag	The medieval Persian name from which samosa, sambusak, samsa and sambuus all come.

A short history

1,100 years from a poem in Baghdad to a kadhai on every Indian street corner.

• 830 · A poem in praise of sanbusaj (Ishaq ibn Ibrahim al-Mawsili, Baghdad)
• 950 · The first recipes: fried in sesame oil (Ibn Sayyar al-Warraq, Baghdad)
• 1335 · Ibn Battuta eats sambusak in Delhi (Ibn Battuta, Delhi)
• 1500 · Eight samosa recipes in the Ni'matnama (Ghiyath Shah and Nasir Shah, Sultans of Malwa, Mandu, Madhya Pradesh)
• 1595 · Qutab, 'which the people of Hind call sanbusa' (Abu'l-Fazl, at the court of Akbar, The Mughal court)
• 1675 · Potatoes growing in Indian gardens (John Fryer, Surat and Karnataka)
• 1935 · A tea campaign makes the chai stall (Indian Tea Market Expansion Board, Railway stations and markets across India)
• 1997 · Oil goes in after frying, not during (Rosana Moreira, Xiuzhi Sun and Youhong Chen, Texas A&M University)

The full story, with 29 moments, charts, people and 43 sources: glassbox.how/e/samosaclear/history. The data lives in history.json.

Video and slides

Made with the Glassbox studio from this box's storyboard (window.glassbox.director). Free to reuse under CC BY 4.0.

File	What	Size
glassbox/reel.mp4	Reel / Short, with captions and soundtrack	1080×1920
glassbox/video.mp4	YouTube video, with captions and soundtrack	1920×1080
glassbox/slide-1…10.jpg	Instagram carousel	1080×1350
glassbox/thumb.jpg	YouTube thumbnail	1280×720
glassbox/cover.jpg	Share card and repo social preview	1200×630
glassbox/history-reel.mp4	“History in 10 moments” Reel / Short	1080×1920
glassbox/history-slide-*.jpg	History carousel	1080×1350
glassbox/post.json	Post copy and schedule used by the publish kit

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