Chicken Samsa — Chicken stuffed pies

Samsa or samosa is an oil-fried or baked national Oriental dish with a salty filling. Visually, it looks like a pie. It comes in different shapes, but most often square, triangular or rounded.

Samsa is popular in Asia, the Mediterranean, North and South Africa, where it is served as an appetizer.

Traditional Uzbek samsa is prepared with lamb in a tandoor on coals. The stuffing is filled with lard, and the meat is chopped into small whole pieces. In India they cook vegetarian layered samsa with mint. Central Asian samsa with meat is also traditionally baked in a tandoor, but there are also variants of samsa cooked at home in the oven. 

Most often, samsa is filled with spicy minced lamb or beef mince, potatoes with spices and cheese. In addition to meat and onions there is a variant of stuffing from lentils or peas, to which pine nuts are sometimes added.

This time I propose to make samosa with chicken. It’s not very canonical, but chicken is easy to find in any store. And using parts like ham, thighs or legs – it is almost impossible to overdry and spoil. In addition, we season it with a mixture of coriander, zira and granulated garlic and not everyone who has tried it will be able to guess that it is samosa with chicken.

Samsa dough can be unleavened or flaky. I will use store-bought puff pastry to make it as simple and fast as possible.

⏱ Cooking time — is 80 minutes overall. Includes 30 minutes of preparation and cooking + 50 minutes unattended.

🥣 Ingredients

🍽 For 4 servings:

• 750 g of puff pastry (no-yeast sheet dough)
• 500 g chicken meat (boneless thigh, leg or 750 g bone-in meat)
• 1-2 onions (1 large or a couple of small ones)
• 1 egg yolk
• 1/2 tsp. cumin seeds
• 1/2 tsp. ground coriander
• 1/2 tsp. granulated garlic
• salt, black pepper
• 1 tbsp. black sesame (you can use white or a mix of white and black)

 🔪Step by step Directions

Take the frozen sheet dough out of the freezer at least 3 hours before cooking. Otherwise, there is a risk that it will not bake sufficiently.

Preheat oven to 190 °C / 375 °F, top+down mode.

Ideally, use chicken thigh fillets to make samosas. This is the meat from the thigh, which has already been separated from the bone for us. In my case, this time it was not on sale and I took a ham on the bone. So the first thing I had to do was cut the meat off the bone.

~ 500 g of chicken meat cut into thin strips, and then cut these strips into cubes about 1*1 cm or smaller.

Transfer the sliced meat to a deep bowl.

Peel 2 bulbs. Cut each one in half and cut into small cubes.

Add the onions to the bowl with the meat. Sprinkle in 1/2 tsp. ground coriander, 1/2 tsp. granulated garlic. Rub the zira between your fingers to bring out the flavor and add there as well.

Pepper, mix well and set aside. There is no need to salt it yet. We’ll do it later, so that the chicken doesn’t start juicing prematurely.

To make the dough easier to work with, divide 750 grams of unleavened sheet dough into three roughly equal parts. Roll out the dough to about 0.5 cm thickness.

Next, I propose to work portion by portion: take one part of the dough, roll it out, make samsa, put it on a tray, cover it with a towel, take the second part of the dough and then go around in a circle.

From the dough, cut out circles about 12 cm in diameter. I used a saucer with a diameter of 11 cm. A margin of error of +/- 2 cm is acceptable. The main thing here is to estimate so that you have minimal waste of dough. You may need to take a slightly smaller saucer or roll out the dough thinner.

From one piece of dough weighing 250 g you should get 6 circles with a diameter of 10-12 cm. I have in the first pictures leftovers from another package, there was less than 250 grams, that’s why I got only 4 circles.

Salt the stuffing in a bowl. I salt by eye, this time I added 2 large pinches of salt, if you are afraid of over-salted 500 g of meat usually recommend about 2/3 of a tsp, I got about 1 tsp. Mix the meat and onions again.

If it is more convenient for you, you can also salt the stuffing portion by portion, after placing it on the dough.

Place about 1 tbsp. of the filling in the center of the cut out circle of dough. Press down a little with a spoon. The filling should not be too much or too little. You should have about 1.5 to 2 cm of empty dough around the edges as you see it.

Now begin to roll up the dough. First, join the top and bottom sides of the dough. Press the edges of the dough well with your fingers so that they come together tightly and will not open during cooking. Then use your fingers to join the rim of the right side of the dough with the first two sides of the left side.

Thus, you should have a triangle of dough.

Place the triangles on a baking tray lined with parchment paper and cover with a towel to keep the dough from getting stale while you stuff the rest.

Repeat the process until the filling or dough runs out.

Whisk 1 egg yolk with a fork, without adding water or milk. Using a brush, brush the egg yolk on the top and sides of the samosa.

Sprinkle sesame seeds on top. (I used black sesame)

Bake for 40-45 minutes in a preheated 190℃ / 375℉ oven. After baking, cool slightly and serve.