Thursday, April 26, 2007

Healthy Moong Dal Dosa / Chila

As my DH says I seem to be fond of all kinds of dosas. This is a simple, easy recipe; good for weekend breakfasts. Another one of my Ma's recipe though I might've made some slight modifications here and there; but as you'll see with the given ingredients there's probably not too much that I could change except the proportions of the ingredients. You can also use the same batter to make yummy moong dal vadas, so don't worry if you've some left-over batter!

What you'll need:
1 cup Yellow Moong dal
1 tbsp Ginger (grated)
1 tbsp Chillies (chopped)
1 tbsp Cilantro/Coriander (finely chopped)
Salt to taste

Let's start cooking:

  • Soak the dal overnite. Generally wherever I need to soak dal, I do it overnite but I guess it would be fine if you soaked it for 4-5 hours.
  • Grind the dal with little water. It's safer to use as little water as possible, if required we can add water later.
  • Mix the other ingredients into the batter. As you mix the ingredients you can see the proportion of chillies, ginger and coriander w.r.t the batter and you can vary it as you like. Regarding the consistency of the battery: it's not flowy, when you drop it from a spoon it'll fall in lumps. At the same time it can't be too thick else you'll be unable to spread it. The way I work (or rather my DH, he's the dosa expert) is to be conservative while adding water. Try a small dosa, if it works fine then you're all set if you're unable to spread add a little water.
  • Now heat a griddle and when it is hot, spread the batter like a dosa. Nothing explain spreading a dosa better than photos I looked up this video on YouTube. The batter in this video is that of a normal dosa so it's quite watery, the moong dal dosa batter is not so watery. If you can't view a video, here's another link.

You've tasty moong dal dosas ready! It tastes good with coconut chutney, green/coriander chutney and tomato ketchup (for kids!).

Notes:
  • If you want to make vadas from the left-over batter, refrigerate the batter so that the dal absorbs some water and the batter gets thick for frying vadas. I would suggest refrigerating it overnite.
  • The most difficult task, if any, is to determine the right consistency of the batter. The dal is not ground to a perfect fine texture, it should be kept slightly coarse. The batter would be quite thick as compared to a normal dosa batter.

2 comments:

Anacrona said...

Yumm. Looks SO delicious.

Smriti said...

Thanks, Shashwati!