Recipe: The India burger

two India burgers - one open and one closed

This burger was a lot of fun to make, and had a real complexity to it.  You know how you can sit down to an Indian dinner and eat an array of dishes, each with its own blend of flavours and yet it all comes together in harmony?  We managed to do that in burger form.  Dan and I wanted to be careful how we put it together and avoid coming away with a saucy mess that overwhelms the tastebuds.  With so many favorite Indian dishes, it was hard to pick which ones would contribute best to the effort.

Butter chicken came to mind early, but it almost seemed too obvious.  Then in considering the cheese component, I thought of butter paneer - one of my all time favorite dishes of any nationality.  I think in the end I was almost as excited for the paneer as I was for the rest of the burger.  Needless to say, couldn't do two butter dishes together, so we opted for a tandoori chicken for our meat (a beef patty seemed altogether inappropriate for this outing), the recipe is the one in the recent post.  The mango papaya chutney from the other recent post stood in as our "relish", and a cucumber raita topped off with micro cilantro helped cool things off.  Things were starting to get pretty saucy, so we threw in a few miniature vegetable pakoras as a layer to soak things up.  You might notice that we like a bit of crunch in our burgers, and we slid a single papadam in for that effect.  The bun?  Just had to go with naan.  Truly a pleasure in the eating.  The breakdown was as such:

The India Burger:

 - bun - naan bread
 - patty - tandoori chicken
 - cheese - paneer
 - relish - mango papaya chutney
 - sauces - cucumber raita
               - butter sauce for the paneer
 - greens - shredded spinach
               - micro cilantro
 - garnishes - vegetable pakoras
                     - papadam