Cooking up some dosas

Cooking up the flavours

After three largely unimpressive meals at Devon Street's Indian restaurants, it was time to try my hand at cooking up some real deal South Indian Veg food at home.  Don't get me wrong, I'll still try to to complete my mission and eat at all of them (probably complaining the entire time and hopefully coming up with more hilarious ways to express my dismay), but on first glance Chicago's Indian scene seems very weak compared to other cities I've eaten it in (London, Kuala Lumpur, Penang, Singapore, Melbourne, to name a few).  I ordered a book to guide me through, and headed up to Devon Street to haul in all the spices and whatnot, most of which I never heard of.  "It'll only take 30 minutes, we'll definitely be back in time for the Bears game," I told my companion, which turned out to be completely false.  Our trip ended up being a fiasco resembling Supermarket Sweep, racing through Patel Brothers and another store to beat the clock. 

 Our race against time included the following phrases:

"Fried gram flour, what the hell is that?  Is that yellow lentils?" 

"Where do you keep your asafoetida powder?" 

"Do we buy fresh tamarinds, or do we just grab this tube of sticky stuff and hope for the best?"

Following complete mystification, and many clueless circles around the fragrant aisles of a couple stores, we returned home with armloads full of product.  I now had packages of ginger root, bay leaves, coriander powder, poppy seeds, turmeric, fenugreek, and a number of other seriously pungent provisions. My companion started to get scared of the potential for stinkage.  "Make sure to open a lot of windows and use the fan,"she urged as we took a whiff of the extremely fragrant asafoetida powder. 

I decided not to join Jamie's revolution after all

You would not believe what you get for $115 on Devon Street!  The regular grocery stores sell stuff for about twice as much.  I didn't think it smelled that much, but all fans were set on high just in case, and I plunged headfirst into my object of desire, the Masala Dosa.

I decided to cheat a little bit on my first attempt and use a package of dosa flour instead of making my own.  You have to soak rice and dal overnight, grind it, and let it ferment for 10 hours to make the flour, and it sounded like a serious hassle.  So my first task was making a coconut chutney.  This was easy enough, and my finished product composed of coconut, gram flour, chiles, and lots of spices looked almost exactly like the picture.  The quoted time of 20 minutes prep time was way off for my clumsy self though, and it took me about twice as long.  The key of the operation was making the potato masala.  This involved boiling potatoes, cooking up a tempering of 7 seasonings and spices, and combining that with a saucepan full of onions, tomatoes, and peppers.  I handled that pretty ok too, and I was starting to feel pretty confident.  So far I'd spent about an hour and a half, and all that remained was mixing up my dosa batter and cooking it up on my griddle.  The mix couldn't have been easier - I tossed in a couple cups of powder and water and was good to go.

Cooking the dosa shell

I kept making the dosa shell too thick and too small though.  It was a tough art to master - a quick twist of the wrist creating a thin spiral of dough on the heated griddle.  Oh well, I was so hungry and the smell of the chutney and the potato masala was tantalizing the heck out of me.  After about three botched attempts, I was able to produce this:

The finished product

It was almost legit!  The flavors were all there, and I just needed to get a sambar going and make the shell a little more thin and long and I'd be rocking out some quality dosa. 

YES!!  I can do this!

I was really excited because my companion thought it was better than the ones we'd eaten up on Devon, and with a little practice, I could be eating close to the same thing I got addicted to in India anytime I wanted!  It's extremely cheap food too, and hardly any fat.  I only used a thimble full of ghee (clarified butter), and the dosa has tons of protein and complex carbs.  Full of confidence, the next time I decided to make my own batter.  But I had another thing coming!  It was much harder than I thought, and even after chopping the living heck of out the rice and black urad dal, my batter was rough in texture, and I ended up with thick, unappetizing dosas.  Maybe I'll just stick to store-bought flour for now!

Vegetable Korma and Mixed Vegetable Curd Salad

My next dish was a lot easier.  I decided to follow up my dosas with a typical South Indian dish with a nice salad on the side.  After making the more-complicated dosa, this seemed pretty easy.  I got the hang of it - temper the seasonings, cook the veggies, combine.  This wasn't my favorite, and I undercooked some stuff, but once again it was a decent stab for a beginner I guess.  Next up, some eggplant and some sambar!