After all of us made Dalgona or how we like to call it 'feti hui' coffee at home, the next thing majority of us were missing was our plate of momos with that spicy red chutney.?
So my family and I decided to make momos at home! When you search for how to make momos at home on the internet, you will come across a plethora of recipes with different variations. But we stuck to the classic plain momos with chicken. (If you are vegetarian, wherever I mention chicken, add paneer).?
The list of ingredients that are needed to create a plate of deliciousness was fairly simple and available in most households. For the dough, you need?2 cups of flour and 2/3 cups water as required.?
For the filling, you need?1.5 kg chicken mince,? small onions diced (a bit more than half a cup), 4-5 tbsp soy sauce, 1 tbsp ground ginger (or fresh ginger if you have it), 4-5 cloves of garlic (more or less depending on how much you like garlic) and 1-2 tsp salt to taste.??
Making the dough was the simplest part of the whole process of making momos. All you have to do is knead the flour with water until a nice soft dough is made. Once done, cover the dough with plastic and keep it aside.?
For the filling, take all the ingredients mentioned above in a big bowl and mix them all till you get a nice even mixture.?
Then, cut out small circles of dough probably 3.5 inches in diameter. Add one spoon of the filling in the middle of your dough cut-out.?
Now is the trickiest part of the entire momo making process that really made me miss the bhaiya who makes the lip-smacking momos in my favoruite market. It's time to give them shape and fold it to make it look like momos.?
Since we never made this before, we decided to fold our momos in a way named by momos expert as Lhasa Style.??You need to grab one edge of the cut-out dough and fold it over the filling, forming a half-moon shape, and quickly pinch the two edges together. On one side of the pinched center, use your thumb to push the piece of dough closest to you towards the center to form a pleat. Pinch this pleat down against the piece of dough further from you. Do this to form 3 pleats to seal off one side of the momo.?
Keep repeating this process that is extremely hard to comprehend and perform until you have made enough momos to feed yourself and your family's craving. Once all your momos are sealed and packed put them in a steamer (we used our idli maker because who knew we will be making momos at home!?
After 10 minutes of keeping the momos in the idli maker, they were ready. But trust me they were nowhere close to the momos we eat outside.?
All that hard work and standing in the kitchen for a solid 3 hours just made me miss my momo wale bhaiya. Our red chutney was nowhere close to the one he would serve us. Sincerely hoping that everything returns back to normal because the first thing I would be rushing out to eat is a big plate of momos while sitting and chatting with my momo bhaiya. They really deserve our love.?