Bhel Recipe – Indian Street Food style Snack Salad with Sweet Potato, Mint and Tamarind Chutney in 20 Mins. Puffed Rice tossed with cooked sweet potato, nuts, onion, cucumber and tomato and dressed in chopped mint and 5 minute Tamarind Chutney. Vegan Bhel Puri Recipe. Can be glutenfree and nutfree. 
Bhel /Bhel Puri is a popular Indian street snack which has a combination of puffed rice, bhel mix, chopped up tomato, onion, cubed cooked potato, mint and cilantro or mint cilantro chutney, tamarind chutney. Bhel mix is usually some crispy chickpea flour noodles + crackers + toasted nuts mixture that you can find at an indian store. Depending on the area, Bhel can have other veggies, sprouts, or some oil and othr names like Churmuri, Jhalmudi.
For this version, I use puffed brown rice. You can use any other puffed or krispie grains such as quinoa, wheat, kamut or millet. Instead of regular potato I use cooked sweet potato in today’s recipe. Sweet Potatoes amazingly well with the sweet sour 5 minute Tamarind chutney and minty flavor profile. Try it!
Add sprouted or cooked Mung beans, chickpeas or lentils to the mix to make it a filling snack. Also see video below.
If the puffed grains aren’t fresh and crispy, you can refresh them by toasting lightly on a skillet for a few minutes and use. You can also use store bought tamarind or tamarind date chutney for a quick fix. This summer, we had our share of Bhel puri on hot summer days when my family was visiting. If you ever traveled in trains in India, stopped at the small road stalls for snacks, tried the chaat style dishes, then you know why this is a popular evening snack.
Most of the Indian Street style snacks are meant to please many of the tastes to get you to want to eat more of it. Lots of flavor and texture combinations make it a unique style of food. In this recipe, the ingredients all together have contrasting flavors and textures, crisp and wet, sweet and sour, fresh herbs + veggies and soft cooked potatoes. Its an explosion of DELICIOUS with each bite!
More Indian Snacks from the blog
- Samosa Pinwheels.
- Baked Mung Dal Samosas
- Baked potato rice crackers – gluten-free
- Baked Maida Papdi – Cumin seed Crackers
The Sev (Chickpea flour noodles) are a savory noodle that are made with chickpea flour, water and spices and deep fried to crisp. Omit them if you cannot find any. Papdi are wheat crackers. Use other wheat crackers or savory crackers of choice. Or make make your own (Baked potato rice crackers GF,Baked Maida Papdi – Cumin seed Crackers).
Kala namak(Indian Sulphur black salt), other than adding eggy tastes to tofu scrambles, is often used to flavor different Chaat dishes.
Video:
Recipe Card
Bhel Recipe- Indian snack Salad with Puffed Rice, Sweet Potato and Tamarind Chutney
Ingredients
Tamarind chutney:
- 1 tbsp tamarind concentrate
- 2 tbsp water
- 2 tbsp maple syrup
- 1/4 tsp ground cumin
- 2 tsp sugar (coconut or raw or jaggery powder)
- a generous pinch of salt, cayenne
- a generous pinch of kala namak (indian sulphur salt), or chaat masala
Bhel Salad:
- 2 cups puffed rice or rice crispies white or brown rice or other unsweetened puffed grains
- 1 small cucumber chopped small
- 1/2 cup finely chopped onion
- 1 tomato finely chopped
- a bunch of mint finely chopped
- a bunch of cilantro chopped
- 1/2 cup cubed sweet potato cooked and cubed small (measured when cubed)
- 2 tbsp raw or roasted peanuts or chopped cashews or add in some cooked chickpeas to make nut-free
- 1/2 tsp chaat masala , optional (See Recipe note for recipe)
- 1/4 tsp salt or more to taste
- cayenne to taste
- lemon juice
optional add ins:
- Sev chickpea flour noodles
- Papdi wheat crackers, omit to make gluten-free
Instructions
- Mix all the ingredients under chutney until well combined in a saucepan over medium heat. Bring to a boil. Carefully taste and adjust salt, sweet(sugar),tang and heat. Add some lemon juice for additional tang. Take off heat, cool
- Chop the cucumber onion, tomato and combine in a bowl. Mix with mint and cilanto. Cook the sweet potato by boiling or steaming to preference and set aside.
- In a large bowl, add the puffed rice. Mix in the chopped cucumber onion tomato mint mix. Add the sweet potato and nuts. Toss lightly.
- Drizzle the tamarind chutney and toss again. Add salt, chaat masala, cayenne and some lime juice and mix. Taste and adjust flavor.
- Garnish with sev (chickpea noodles) and papdi(crackers) if using. Crumble some of the crackers. Serve immediately. Bhel is best served immediately as the puffed grains will become soggy over time.
Video
Notes
Nutrition
cindi
last October my daughter came home after traveling for 3 years with the last year and a half in India and she brought home some spicy crunchy snacks from south India, we added them to this recipe and it was perfect, we have made this several times and it is one of our favorites, always reminds me of our travels to India! Thank you for all the great recipes!
Richa
Awesome!
Rani
Hi Richa,
I make Bhel often but never with sweet potato, sound amazing, I’ll sure try it.
Thank you
indian starters
I’m not that much of an internet reader to be honest but your blogs really nice, keep it up! I’ll go ahead and bookmark your website to come back down the road.
Vegan Richa Support
hope to see you again
Salima
I made this and your butter tofu for my parents and they were both a hit! I think they’re relieved that I can cook Indian food lol, thank you for that!! 😉
Richa
Thats awesome!!
Pam
I recently had Bhel for the first time and I was thrilled to see you had a recipe for it! I tried it tonight and it was delicious! I added both chickpeas and lentils to make it a little heartier for a meal. Congratulations also on the new cookbook! There are so many great recipes I want to try.
Richa
Thanks! Its such a burst of flavors and textures. So glad you tried it! Thank you for getting the book too!
Cassie Autumn Tran
When I thought I was so knowledgeable about Indian cuisine, I TOTALLY was corrected by the sight of this recipe! This is something I really want to try now!
Richa
Indian cuisine is super vast with many regional cuisines and sub cuisines like chaat, regional main cuisine, regional snack cuisine and so on. 🙂 So much to veggie food!
Jerod Killick - Svelte Yeti
Wow! This simply looks relish – fresh and also filling. Thank you for posting! I am going to try this one, maybe with cargo rice as a replacement.