These samosas are the best in the world. Definitely worth a try... but if you are completely time poor like me, you can use this filling and make curry puffs using puff pastry instead. I have also recently experimented with baking these samosas too, brushing them with oil and cooking them in a hot (around 200 degrees celsius) oven until done (about 30 minutes).
To make the mince filling for around 40 small samosas, you will need:
500 grams of beef mince, 3 star (the mince needs some fat)
1 tablespoon of oil
3 cloves of garlic, crushed
a tablespoon of ginger, crushed
1 green chilli, split vertically down the middle
1 heaped tablespoon of bottle masala (or very good, freshly made curry powder)
1 cup of fresh or frozen peas
1 tablespoon of full fat yoghurt
1 teaspoon of salt
Fresh lemon juice to taste
(One potato, boiled and mashed, optional)
For the samosas you will need:
1 packet of frozen spring roll pastry
a bottle of peanut oil
To make the mince, heat the oil in a large heavy frying pan. Add the ginger, garlic and chilli, fry until it smells nice, then add the bottle masala, followed by the mince. Keep frying to break up the mince. Lower heat and cover and cook for a few minutes, then remove the lid, turn the heat back up and fry the mince until it is quite dry and the fat is released (it starts to fry in its own fat). Throw in the peas and cook until they are done, then add salt, stir in the yoghurt and squeeze in some lemon juice (to taste). You can stir in some chopped spring onion and/or coriander at this point too, and another option is to add in some mashed potato to make the mixture softer. Set aside and leave to cool.
To make the samosas, defrost the pastry and cut the sheets into 4 strips. You need two layers of pastry on top of each other per samosa. In a small bowl, make a thick paste of flour and water and set aside, this is your 'glue'. Also get hold of a damp tea towel to cover and keep the stack of pastry damp so that it doesn't dry out.
Starting at the top, fold the pastry strip down into a triangle, and take the opposite corner and fold over to make a slightly bigger triangle. You should now have a small cone that you need to fill with a heaped teaspoon or so of cold mince. Once the mince is in the pastry, keep folding the pastry down into triangle shapes, taking the opposite corner each time. Keep the corners tight so the mince filling stays inside, and use the flour and water paste to 'stick' the folds together. When you have just a small bit of pastry left, apply some paste and tuck it into the last fold, like an envelope. The photo above should demonstrate each fold from start to finish where my explanation has failed.
When you have all your samosas done, you will need to shallow fry them on high heat in a large, heavy frying pan using about an inch of oil. They won't take more than a couple of minutes on each side to brown. Drain them on kitchen paper when they are done.
If you have made a big batch of samosas you can also freeze them uncooked in small batches, to make it easy for them to be defrosted and fried up. You can also easily warm up leftover samosas in the oven to keep them crispy. We don't really have this problem as they disappear pretty quickly.