Yummy Kerala food, recipe one: Dosa part 2

This part of making the dosa is all about grinding. Read on to figure out how to turn the soaked daal and rice from the previous part into a paste for fermentation.

We saw how the urad daal and rice were soaked for grinding in part one of the Dosa recipe. Here we grind the soaked daal and rice, now soft after some hours of absorbing water.

The video below shows the whole grinding process. It is very simple, just remember these points:

 

0. Use a good grinder, preferably an Indian made one for grinding Iddly and Dosai mixes. If you really want to go the whole way, get the low-speed wet grinders with stone wheels made in the south of India. They imitate the old-fashioned way of grinding the pastes without heating up the dough, a feat impossible to duplicate with the modern high speed blade-based food processors. Such a slow grinding is the only way to get a smooth, velvety dough for Iddly, Dosai, and Vadai. Iddly and Vadai are the two other items than normally accompany Dosai, forming the perfect trinity for breakfast in South India.

1. Add just enough water to cover the daal and grind till the paste is really smooth - no grains should remain. Make sure that you do not overgrind and cook the daal with the heat generated during grinding.

2. Grind the rice with slightly more water than necessary to cover the initial amount of rice in the grinder. Grind till it is fine-grained. Grain size somewhere between that of sugar and table salt is adequate. Uniformity in grain size is more important for better Dosai than grain size itself.

3. You can add salt, or not, as needed to the mix any time during grinding. A heaping teaspoon of raw salt is a good starting point.

4. After grinding both rice and daal, mix them in a bowl, thoroughly. Cover, and leave it to ferment in a warm place, at around 30 degrees Celsius. This takes about eight hours. The dough is ready to be turned into Dosai at that point. This is described in part three of this series.