Jhalmuri (Puffed Rice with Chanachur and Tomatoes)

Being an Asian and a Bengali I love fresh ingredients and spices. We enjoy consuming a lot of snacks and often times we prepare it at home. Store bought cookies, candies, and other meals are fine too, but once in a while, we enjoy our homemade recipes that give us the taste of our place.

This particular recipe is not alien to the people outside Bangladesh because at different times Jhalmuri has been featured in Travel and Food channels worldwide. It is made with fresh tomatoes, onion, cucumber, lemon, and herbs like coriander, mint, parsley, and basil. I personally like to add lots of coriander in my Jhalmuri. To make this snack you need to buy Chanachur which can easily be found in the foreign section of any super shop. Usually, Bombay mix Chanachur is what most stores keep in their stock. Another ingredient that you need to buy is puffed rice, which is another item almost all super shops keep in their foreign section.

Chanachur

Jhalmuri can be very simple and made with only 5 ingredients (puffed rice, chanachur, onion, tomato, oil) or it can be super fancy and 12 ingredients can be added to it. If you like it to be extravagant, you can add lemon juice, lemon rind, mustard oil, sesame seeds, fried peanuts, roasted chickpeas, roasted grams, roasted rice etc.  

For this recipe, I have tried to keep it quite basic. I’m using tomatoes, coriander, onion, green chilies, chanachur, puffed rice and some mustard oil. For me mustard oil really adds up to the flavor. It gives the snack a sharp and distinct taste.

To start you need to wash your vegetables. Cut them into really thin and small pieces. If you do not like spicy snacks, deseed your chilies. Here I have kept the seeds because I enjoy the heat.

Add some salt to the onion and mix using your fingers. Add the mustard oil to the onion and mix well. Add the coriander to it and mix. Finally, add the chanachur and mix again.

Add the puffed rice and mix well. Make sure to mix in the tomatoes at the end because the tomatoes have some liquid in it which makes the puffed rice lose its crunchiness very soon. To me, Jhalmuri tastes so good for its crunchiness.

If you want to add more ingredients like I have mentioned earlier, make sure to add the liquid type ingredients at the last. Also do not make this snack ahead of time, this snack needs to be served right away otherwise the crunchiness would get vanished.