The KSh 280 Java House Samosa is Overrated

29 February 2024|Nairobi Fast Food & Snacks

In a world where bigger often means better, the Java House samosa stands as a towering testament to the triumph of size over substance. In this post, we will review the giant samosas from Java House Cafes; they are offered in beef and chicken variations, so went with beef here.

Table of Contents

Presentation

Picture this: you’re presented with a normal-sized plate with one samosa that fills the entire thing up.

The samosa itself looms large trying even to assert dominance, while not one but two wedges of lemon sit by. Looks pretty good

Is this samosa stupidly big? Yes.

Did I always want to eat it anyway? Also yes.

The biggest concern about this oversized samosa is it will still be cold in the middle, and we’ll see about that later in this post.

Also, this being a big samosa means The filling-to-flour to flour crust ratio is way off, there is more filling than the crust you can’t taste the crust.

It definitely doesn’t come with chutney or kachumbari, I mean even tiny street samosas come with that. Also, no green chutney? (That would make this better) like how it is done in Indian restaurants. green chutney is basically from cilantro/ coriander and spices.

The idea of the existence of a samosa in the first place is to have pastry and filling in every bite, just like how you expect that sausagey goodness with every bite of a hotdog.

The problem with giant samosas is that they can’t achieve that, at some point in the middle you’ll only be tasting the filling with no chance for the pastry because of the larger volume of the filling. Well unless they somehow manage to have pastry in between the filling.

Again, the pastry itself will be thicker than normal to contain the unusually large volume of filling, so again texture will probably be compromised in comparison to the thin and crispy pastry in normal samosa sizes.

Taste

Biting on, pleasant surprise, not as bad as expected. The flavor of the pastry is good on the outside and slightly chewy on the inside, it’s okay for the size of this thing, which was expected. The perfect pastry should be all crisp, while the inside should be juicy.

However the inside filling is not that juicy, everything is a little on the dry side, not overly dry obviously, but a little moist filling would be appreciated.

Surprisingly I expected the insides to be cold due to the size but that was untrue, the samosa was evenly heated, it’s just that I expected worse.

Perhaps the most disappointing thing about this beef samosa is the bland filling, I mean no flavor here, I wonder if any spices went into this thing, the only flavor you get is from the onions and coriander leaves.

The lemon squeeze from the wedges, however, lifts everything up, just a squeeze in and it is much better, I don’t know how the logic to that magic, but it works.

While the lemon squeeze elevates the samosa experience, I feel like seasoning of the filling at the cooking stage will go a long way.

Also, the filling is not cohesive and everything falls apart on the bite, that is due to insufficient moisture, or homogeneity of the filling ingredients. You can check the image above.

Thoughts?

The Java House samosa serves as a cautionary tale: a reminder that size doesn’t matter

In the end, it’s not about the size of the samosa, but the depth of flavor and the textures.

It’s okay to hate me, they hated Jesus for telling the truth. The whole appeal of Java House Samosas is their behemoth size, nothing else is special.

Java House keeps this as a signature menu item, something they can be associated with, which is a smart marketing move, since whenever you hear big samosa, you’ll be thinking Java House.

In conclusion, I would say any large samosa (from anywhere) will probably only appeal to the eyes and not so much to the palate.

“Giant food rarely has a place. It usually ruins the ratios of a good bite, unless it’s just elongated like a pizza”

PS: Whoever bought me this samosa, what can I say except thank you?