Our Lauki Sabzi Recipe

If you’re looking for an easy yet highly creative way to complement your Indian-themed feasts, lauki sabzi might just be the dish of your dreams! 

Made with a few simple ingredients, chief among them is the humble but mighty bottle of gourd. You can have this side served up in next to no time!

Lauki sabzi is a nutritious, low-calorie, mouthwatering snack that works well with a whole host of dishes within and beyond Indian cuisine, and today, we’re going to help you make it.

While it’s seen primarily as a summer snack, we feel it’s suitable year-round when paired with the right meals, so come sun, rain, or snow, it’s always worth whipping up some lauki sabzi and digging in!

Reasons To Love This Lauki Sabzi Recipe

Even though this is a very simple side, we can think of a plethora of reasons to love it dearly, but we’ve included the main points below.

Few Spices Required

You don’t need an absolutely stacked spice rack to get in on the action here. Hing is about as exotic as this recipe gets, and most lovers of Indian food will already have some hidden away somewhere in their kitchens.

Few Ingredients Required

Following our last point, it’s not just spices you don’t need many of, but ingredients in general, meaning you can treat yourself to some homemade lauki sabzi without breaking the bank or dragging an enormous trolley around the grocery store.

Powerful Flavors

Lauki sabzi proves that you can make hard-hitting food with a bare-essentials ingredient list. It tastes far more complex than it actually is.

Satvik

For the uninitiated, satvik means that a dish has no onions or garlic in it. As almost every cuisine uses onion and garlic as a base, it can be incredibly tricky for those who either don’t like to or cannot eat them due to dietary restrictions.

But in lauki sabzi, these diners have a friend, one that doesn’t lack flavor despite the absence of the two most common vegetables on the planet.

Low Calorie

If you’re counting calories at the minute, you can rest assured that lauki sabzi isn’t going to derail your diet, as it’s super healthy while still somehow feeling like comfort food.

Lauki Sabzi — Ingredients

Gather the handful of ingredients listed below, and you can get started making this incredible side dish.

• 2 tbsp cooking oil

• 1 tsp mustard seeds

• 1 tsp cumin seeds

• 1 green chili

• 10 curry leaves

• ½ tsp turmeric powder

• ⅛ tsp hing

• 4 cups diced lauki (bottle gourd)

• Salt to taste

• ½ tsp garam masala

• 1 tbsp cilantro leaves (finely chopped)

Making Lauki Sabzi — A Step-By-Step Guide

Ingredients at the ready? Fabulous; let’s begin!

• Step 1: Peel and dice your bottle gourd.

• Step 2: Heat up some cooking oil on a medium heat. Ideally, you’ll use a kadai, but if that’s not an option, a normal pan will suffice.

• Step 3: Throw in your mustard seeds and let them sizzle until they start popping.

• Step 4: Add your cumin seeds and sizzle for about 2 minutes longer.

• Step 5: Sprinkle in your hing and turmeric and stir the contents of the kadai or pan.

• Step 6: With your ingredients well mixed, it’s time to throw in your diced bottle gourd and a sprinkle of salt.

• Step 7: Give the contents of your pan another good stir.

• Step 8: Cook until the gourd softens. There’s plenty of moisture in the gourd, so you shouldn’t have to worry too much about your sabzi sticking to your kadai or pan, but it’s worth stirring once in a while.

• Step 9: Next up, throw your garam masala in, and then, finally, your chopped cilantro.

• Step 10: Give your sabzi one last thorough stir, and voilà; it’s ready to serve — Simple, right?

Pro Tips For Making Lauki Sabzi

• If you’re not such a fan of bottle gourd, don’t sweat it. You can switch the gourd out for whatever you like! Why not give eggplant a shot? Or if you want to keep things super simple, carrots are a good option.

And who says you have to stick to just one vegetable? Feel free to celebrate all your favorites by combining them in this dish!

• Can you really handle your spice? If so, go ahead and double, triple, or perhaps even quadruple the green and red chili in this recipe. On the other hand, if you find even korma to be too spicy, then remove the chili altogether.

• Have all your ingredients and spices prepared before you begin cooking. That way, you can streamline the process, eliminating the chances of accidentally burning, say, your mustard seeds or both your mustard and cumin seeds.

• Your lauki sabzi will last for about three days in the fridge so long as it’s stored in an airtight container and fully cooled before it goes in.

• You can freeze lauki sabzi as well. It should last a month.

• For a gluten-free version of this recipe, replace the hing, remove it, or grind it yourself.

Lauki Sabzi Serving Suggestions

Lauki sabzi is such a versatile side that it’d probably be easier to say what it doesn’t go with than all the things it does, but we somehow managed to whittle this section down to a few prime suggestions.

• Literally any curry: Korma, tikka masala, biryani, kashmir, mughalai, balti, dhansak, pasanda, rogan josh, pathia, bhuna… it’s all good.

• Lauki sabzi goes down a treat as part of a tapas board or thali, which is more or less the Indian equivalent.

• Just after a snack? Why not pair your lauki sabzi with a naan, roti, or kulcha.

• Poppadoms are a fantastic addition to a sabzi meal, too.

• Most types of rice work well with lauki sabzi. Plain is probably your best bet, but if you have a favorite, feel free to stick with that.

Final Thoughts

If you’re looking for an Indian side dish that exists at an intersection between flavor and simplicity, it’s sabzi, and while there are basically infinite ways to approach this classic snack, our lauki sabzi recipe is the perfect jumping-off point.

It can be eaten on its own as a light yet tasty snack or paired with innumerable other sides and mains if you’re looking for a more substantial bite. 

And perhaps best of all, you can have a batch of delicious lauki sabzi whipped up in as little as 25 minutes!