Yummy Kerala food, recipe one: Dosa part 1

There is a crêpe-like dish made for breakfast in southern India called Dosa in Malalayalam or Dosai in Tamil. Here is one way to make it.

Even though it is easy enough nowadays to find instant mixes to make this tasty and nourishing food, it is more satisfying to make this from scratch, using just rice, urad daal, and some salt. You can omit the salt without affecting anything except the taste.

You need one part of urad daal and four parts of rice to start off with this recipe. A quarter cup of daal and a cup of rice will give you around a dozen dosas of 20cm in diameter. Get Iddly rice from a south Indian or Sri Lankan grocery shop for consistent results from this recipe. You can also use other types of rice, but results would vary. I have tried standard supermarket rice of the polished variety with acceptable results. Below is a video of stage one of the preparation, where the rice and daal are cleaned thoroughly and left to soak for eight hours or so.

After this soaking, the rice and daal turn soft enough to be blended into a smooth paste with a food processor.

In Part 2, I show how the soaked rice and daal are ground to a paste of the right consistency to obtain a proper dosa.

Here is a list of the ingredients:

• Urad daal: about 65mL (one part)
• Iddly rice: about 250mL (four parts)

As shown in the video in the sidebar, clean the rice and daal separately several times in small amounts of water, changing the water often (this method of washing is as effective as using large amounts of water, conserves water, and is faster to boot). Soak separately in about 500mL of water for eight hours at least.

In the end, this should yield around 12 dosais of about 20cm diameter.