Baked Spicy Tindora Fries Recipe

These Baked Spicy Tindora Fries would make a delicious, gluten free, snack or side dish to your favorite burger! We bet you'll love 'em.

Tindora, known as ivy gourd, kowal, or scarlet gourd, is a vegetable that seems to always be flying off the shelf at Cherian’s, a South Asian store here in Atlanta, that I frequent.

Part of the gourd family, Tindora, which goes by the scientific name of Coccinia grandis, is quite popular in the southern part of India.

However, I don’t recall being introduced to it during my childhood years in Sri Lanka, which is located at the very southernmost tip of India.

So, ever since I tasted tindora for the first time a couple of years ago, I have been on a mission to enjoy tindora every which way!

I’ve made it into a curry, used it in a delicious stir fry and today we have Oven Baked Spicy Tindora Fries!

Tindora looks a lot like mini-cucumbers. But they are a lot firmer to the touch than cucumbers are. Tindora are also said to have a higher nutritional value.

If you bite into a raw piece of Tindora, it is super crunchy (a lot crunchier than cucumbers are) but raw tindora leaves behind a slightly bitter aftertaste.

As I’m not a huge fan of that bitter aftertaste, I prefer to enjoy Tindora curried, stir fried or baked!

While most times I try to share recipes using ingredients that can be found at your local grocery store, I haven’t been able to find tindora at mainstream grocery stores, yet.

Currently I have seen it at several South Asian stores and multi-cultural establishments like The Dekalb Farmer’s Market and the Buford Highway Farmer’s Market here in Atlanta, GA.

However, after running into a huge jackfruit at my local Kroger and rambutan at the Walmart across the street, there’s no telling when tindora will make an appearance at a grocery store near ya!

Anyhoot…

Getting back to these Baked Spicy Tindora Fries, I used gluten free bread crumbs and rice flour spiked with coriander, smoked paprika, salt and chili powder.

Which makes them a delicious, gluten free snack or side dish to your favorite burger!

This recipe is really an easy one, the hardest part is to remember to not use one hand to dredge the tindora in flour, dip them into an egg wash and drop and coat them in the breadcrumbs.

If tindora is hard to find, you can use this same recipe to make crunchy carrot fries or even crispy zucchini fries served up with a bit of ketchup and my favorite sweet chili sauce. 

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