Beet patties get oomph from spices and creamy chutney

Modern spin on popular Indian street food uses the entire root vegetable

My mother had the best snacks waiting for us when my brother and I came home from school. After the bus dropped us off outside our building in Mumbai, we’d discuss what snack mom had prepared. It was a daily surprise: chaat like bhel puri (a crunchy rice puff salad), sev puri (fried dough with boiled potatoes, chutneys and chickpea noodles), or vaghareli bread (tempered, spiced bread). Sometimes she’d make idli-sambar (steamed rice cakes with a lentil stew). Often, it was tikkis, made out of whatever fancied her that day.

What are tikkis? Tikkis, also known as cutlets or patties, are a popular street food from the northern part of India. They are usually made with potatoes, spices, herbs and breadcrumbs, but they can be formed out of different kinds of vegetables or even cooked daals, or lentils. They are typically eaten with a chutney, such as a cilantro chutney or date-tamarind chutney, but my kids like to eat them with ketchup.

Sometimes, we would eat tikkis as patties in burger buns with tomatoes, cucumbers, onions, lettuce and mayo. If there were no burger buns, we would slap them between two slices of soft sandwich bread with butter and cilantro chutney. There is no right or wrong with tikkis. Enjoy them how you want!

For these tikkis, I am turning to beets. The bulbous root vegetable is extremely good for you, with a lot of vitamins and minerals. You’ll most commonly find red beets, which have a deep maroon color, in grocery stores. They have an acquired, earthy taste, which I happen to love! But you can find other varieties of beets at farmers’ markets, like yellow beets, which are sweeter in taste and great in salads.

You can boil, roast, saute or fry beets, but my favorite is roasting them to retain the color and moisture. (Check out my book, “Mumbai Modern,” for one of my beet dishes, Citrus and Beet Salad with Paneer Nuggets.) For these beet tikkis, you can roast the beets a day or two in advance, and store them in the fridge until ready to use. Don’t forget the flavorful beet greens: They’re often chopped and sauteed, but you can make them into a lovely pesto or chutney.

I dislike waste of any kind, and I love recipes that use vegetables in their entirety. So here, I use the beetroot to make the Beet Tikkis and the greens to make a very delicious chutney.

The chutney is an easy one: Simply put all the ingredients in a high-speed blender and blitz until smooth. It is based on the cilantro chutney you’ll see in many Indian restaurants. I add beet greens instead, and a tad bit of Greek yogurt, for a lovely taste and texture. The chutney can be made a day or two in advance, stored in the fridge.

Once the beets are roasted and cooled, it’s easy to peel them, and then the tikkis come together within 30 minutes. There are a bunch of spices in the tikkis, which give them the oomph factor. Rice flour and sesame seeds add a bit of a crunch to the outside.

My kids have been loving the Beet Tikkis and taking them in burger buns for lunch. Talk about being the envy of other school kids — lip-smacking, homemade Beet Tikki burgers!

Amisha Gurbani/Special to The Chronicle These tikkis with chutney are an easy and almost entirely waste-free snack that uses beets, plus their greens for a bold chutney.