I personally hate the name ‘gourd.’ I mean any vegetable name that ends with ‘gourd’, makes me almost cry. Well, my personal feelings for the name gourd doesn’t effect anything, however just for your knowledge, gourd usually refers to all the veggies that belongs to Cucurbitaceae family, same family where cucumber belongs. Basically, Pointed Gourd is just a small, with two pointed end, weird looking cucumber, scientific name Trichosanthes dioica! In Bangla, we call it Potol, which is a vital summer vegetable in Bangladesh. Some Bangladeshi dies for potol, some like me, love Potol in certain ways only. Today I am going to share a very basic recipe called Potol Bhaja, which is amazing to eat with rice as a starter.

For this recipe, we just need turmeric powder and salt and some vegetable oil to fry.

Meanwhile I am showing how to prepare potol. Potol has a very thin layer which if we remove by peeling, we loose half of the vegetable. So the best way to remove the skin is to scrape with sharp side of knife and remove the striped green skin. Also don’t forget to remove the both ‘pointy’ side of Pointed gourd.

Now, after scraping the skin, if you cut the potol in half, you will see the seeds. Some seeds are soft but when the flesh inside is bit yellowish, it means the seeds are hard and not palatable. So I removed the hard seeds with a help of spoon.

Now I coat the sliced pointed gourds with turmeric and salt.

Then I heated up some oil in a pan and added spice coated gourds.

I flipped them halfway and fried in medium heat until the potols were golden brown and curled up.

This is how the simple yet marvelous potol fry looks like. The crunchy texture of potol give you an unique taste – I guess that’s why Bangladeshis love Potol so much!

Recipe: Potol Fry, serves 4

Ingredients: Potol/pointed gourds- 4 medium pieces Tumeric powder – 1/2 tsp Salt – to taste Vegetable oil – to fry

1. Prepare potol, scrape the skin, remove the seeds and cut them into 4 pieces. 2. Coat potol pieces with turmeric powder and salt. 3. Fry them in medium heat until crispy and golden brown. Serve with warm rice.