I made these onion bhajis recently and was very pleased with them. In these times of stripped supermarket shelves, recipes using minimal ingredients are even more useful than normaI. I used gram flour (chickpea flour), but if you don’t have that, ordinary flour would also work well.

Gram flour has 22g of protein per 100g, whereas white wheat flour has 10g, so twice as much. Gram flour is also gluten free if you areconcerned about that.

How To Make Onion Bhajis

The key to this recipe is the tiny amounts that are fried for each bhaji. Any more than a really mean amount will come out as more of a pancake, which would be lovely, but not a bhaji.

• Peel & slice the onion into crescents, very thinly
• Mix in everything else
• Heat the oil and fry tablespoons of mixture for a couple of minutes each side until brown and crispy.
• If you use too much mixture at a time, they will be thicker and more puddingy. So be sparing
• Best eaten immediately, while they’re crisp

A thinner batter will give crisper results than a thicker one. So if it needs it, add little splash more water

Changes you can make to the base recipe

I have done this with fine strips of red cabbage and Savoy cabbage.

Would work too with ribbons of carrot, swede, celeriac or any hard vegetable

You can change the flavour by adding

• curry powder or paste
• Thai paste
• lots of black pepper
• tomato puree
• soy sauce in place of some of  the water 
• or hoisin sauce, sweet chilli sauce or any kind of chutney or pickle

Have a play, see what you come up with – and let us know so we can copy you 🙂