How to snip chutney
February 17th, 2007 at 9:04 am (Cooking, Food)
Last night, I decided to try a new recipe for dinner with a friend: Chutney-Filled Chicken and Pastry Bundles. As expected from the name, the recipe calls for chutney. I’ve never cooked with chutney before, but I found a couple of jars of it in the store and settled on some Pear-Cardamom Chutney that claimed to go well with chicken. Imagine my surprise when I got home and started the recipe, only to encounter this instruction:
Snip chutney.
Snip the chutney? How do you snip a sauce-like substance? My friend and I wondered if chutney were also some kind of snippable herb, like parsley or cilantro, and maybe I’d just picked up entirely the wrong thing. We decided to go for it anyway (did I mention that it claimed to go well with chicken?). While I continued to cook, she went and got “What Einstein Told His Cook” off my shelf. No mention of chutney, snippable or not. She then checked “What Einstein Told His Cook 2”. No luck. I mentioned that we could just google for it, but by then we were nearly done cooking and the chicken-stuffing mixture with the pear-cardamom chutney had passed several initial taste tests as is. In fact, 30 minutes of baking later, the result was absolutely delicious (I’d cook it again!), so it no longer mattered.
But that didn’t really resolve the question, so this morning I googled “chutney” to find out if it were some kind of herb. No luck there, but I found the solution when I googled “snip chutney”:
“Snipping” is a common instruction in recipes involving chutney. Since chutneys often include chunks of fruit, snipping is recommended to cut up the larger pieces of fruit.
So I did have the right ingredient, and the book wasn’t wrong, and we made the recipe correctly (the only chunky pieces in this chutney were raisins, and they were just fine full-size). And guess what: it went well with chicken!
Leighton said,
February 18, 2007 at 6:41 pm
I don’t think I have ever made anything involving chutney, but this is good to know for future reference!
Shauna said,
August 29, 2008 at 1:17 pm
Thanks for this! I too just found a recipe that called for “snipped chutney” and had no idea what they were talking about. I thought snipping was reserved for things like fresh chives or parsley that could be, you know, snipped, like with a scissors. I’m pretty sure it would be pretty messy if I were to take my kitchen scissors to the contents of a jar of chutney. Why not just say “chop finely” like normal people would?
randy coffman said,
January 10, 2018 at 2:19 pm
Definitely helped since the recipe is Chutney Beef Kabobs and I never heard of chutney, or snipped chutney. Trying this recipe this weekend.thanks for the help.
Edna said,
November 15, 2019 at 5:54 pm
I had the exact same problem and my snipped chutney ggogle search led me here! Thank you so much!