Calling all lentil lovers: help me test a dal bhaat recipe! 15 February 2008 11:53 am
Posted by Tracy in : vegan, nepal, recipes, vegetarian, friends, cooking , trackbackHey kids! If you don’t have meal plans for this weekend, allow me to make a suggestion: delicious dal bhaat, Nepali lentils with rice. In particular, I’d love the hell out of it if you tried the recipe in this post and let me know how it turns out. I’ve made a few changes from my first attempt, mostly in the combination of dal used, but I’ve got suggestions about that in case you don’t have (and don’t want to acquire) an extensive collection of dried pulses (which describes my pantry remarkably well, but I digress). So. If you think you might be up for a little weekend adventure cooking, read on!
Dal bhaat recipe, take 2
A few preliminary notes: It might help to think of this dal as not like a stew but more of a sauce for rice. Or you could eat it as a soup, but I’ve got a recipe to suggest as an alternative to that. Just sayin’. The other thing I want to point out is that this recipe makes a lot of food, especially if served over rice, so you might want to halve it if you don’t have a lot of people helping you eat it (on the other hand, it’s super-cheap, so you could invite friends over for a dal bhaat party for way less than the price of ordering pizza). As for the rice, I learned to eat dal like this on long-grain white rice, so that’s what I recommend, and there’s plenty of time to make it while the dal cooks. If you want to serve the dal on brown rice, you should probably get that started first to be on the safe side.
What You Need (Ingredients and Equipment)
- cutting board, knives, measuring cups and spoons
- decent sized cooking pot (3-4 quarts)
- something to stir hot stuff with
- 250 grams (about 1/2 pound or 1 to 1 1/4 cups) dal: I like a mix of red lentils and black and yellow split mung beans (urad dal and moong dal, respectively), about 100 grams (~1/2 cup) each of the red and yellow, and just 50 grams (~1/4 cup) of the black to mix up the color and texture. But really: use what you’ve got, as long as it’s a dried split bean or pea that goes mushy if you cook it for long enough. Yellow split peas, red lentils, dried split mung beans of any color — even brown lentils will work if you’re willing to cook them long enough.
- vegetable oil
- 1 small to medium onion, chopped fairly fine
- 4-6 cloves of garlic, minced
- 1-2 inches fresh ginger, also minced
- 1/2 teaspoon turmeric
- 1/2 teaspoon cumin
- 1 1/2 teaspoon coriander
- 1 teaspoon kosher salt (that’s 1/2 teaspoon of the finer grained table salt or sea salt)
- Optional for spice wimps, but delicious: 3-4 whole dried chilis, chopped (alternatively, use 1/4 to 1/2 teaspoon cayenne)
What You Do
Rinse the dal in cold water — it will cook pretty quickly but you can speed it up even more by leaving it to soak while you prep the rest of the ingredients. Now is also a good time to check the dal for little stones and stuff, and pick those out — depending on your dal, you might be fine, but there’s always a chance of extra-crunchy bits, which are hard on the teeth, to put it mildly, so take care. Drain and set aside.
Heat 1-2 tablespoons of oil over medium-high heat (or just medium if you’re taking your time, in which case add a minute or two to all the times here), then add the onions and sweat 2-3 minutes, stirring occasionally, until they start turning translucent but not really browning. Add the garlic and ginger and continue cooking for another minute or so until deliciously aromatic.
Next, add the spices. They will stick to the bottom of the pan and that’s okay. Add the drained dal and stir everything together until the lentils and so forth are well-coated with spices and oil.
Pour in a little water, maybe 1/4 to 1/2 cup and scrape the bottom of the pan to free the spices. Add more water as needed and keep scraping until the bottom of the pan is relatively clear, then add water for a grand total of six cups, and bring everything to a boil.
Reduce the heat until the contents of the pot are simmering instead of threatening to boil over, and cook the dal for at least half an hour, until the red lentils have turned from their raw orange-pink color to yellow, and the urad and moong dal are tender (taste a spoonful; if it’s crunchy or even al dente, give it another ten minutes or so).
Meanwhile, make rice however you like; as I said above, 30 minutes should be plenty of time for long-grain white rice, which is my preferred vehicle for this dal. If you want to serve the dal on brown rice, starting it first might be the way to go, or else you can just let your dal cook longer.
If the dal gets done before the rice, just keep it warm on your stove’s lowest setting.
Leftover dal can be refrigerated and reheats well; I’ve kept batches for as long as a week but that might have been pushing my luck; I should really get in the habit of freezing anything that doesn’t get eaten in three or four days, just to be on the safer side.
Anyway, happy weekend, and if you try this recipe, please let me know how it turned out!
Comments»
I have every intention of trying this recipe, but it might not happen until April, I’m kind of up to my neck in alligators right now. Hopefully, April some of them will have swam away, or maybe I will just make one of them my agent and name him Arnie (obscure reference, sorry, I’m tired) Thank you for posting and I look forward to trying it.
Hi CJ! There’s absolutely no hurry on the dal bhaat recipe testing — it’s not like it calls for super time-sensitive seasonal ingredients or anything. It’s an anytime food, by which I mean any time you make it, I’ll be happy to hear how it turns out! Also any time is when I will be happy to hear about your adventures with alligators (hopefully of the metaphorical persuasion). Hang in there!
(*points at self*) Lentil lover: I is one. Hey, can you tell me why the hell I can’t find black lentils anywhere? I just want to make dal bukhara instead of buying those pouches of it, but black lentils must be rare or exotic or something. Neither of the big co-ops have them. Waitaminnit… are they in fact black mung beans? Maybe that’s it. I’m learning that the word “lentils” gets used a bit loosely sometimes.
I think I can give this recipe a shot next week sometime. This looks fantastic, and I literally need to cook. I’m starting to slip off the wagon, and I was beginning to get into a good pattern. Must… not… fall back into Ramen-Land…
Hi Simone! I should write a big post with pictures about how the word “dal” is translated as “lentils” when really it means “umbrella term for dried split pulse of any kind” — more descriptive but not nearly as catchy. Lentils, beans, peas, chickpeas, they’re all fair game for being called “dal”. I’ve been using split black mung beans (urad dal, says the bag from the Asian market) but I just found some realio-trulio black lentils in the back of one of my cabinets…. no idea how old they are, but of course I’ll be giving them a try in the not too distant future. Good luck evading instant noodles!
I made this tonight. It was good.
So, *months* after the post, I did make this, and I liked it very much, especially as a companion to a mushroom curry for a super-earthy kind of meal. Anyway, my only gripe is that is was really soupy, which may have been a result of the kind of lentils I used (didn’t have time to get fancy at the Indian grocery, so I just used what I could find at the nearby Whole Foods) — I knocked the liquid down by a cup, and I think I will cut a second cup next time to make it a lot thicker — the mushroom curry is pretty soupy, to, so it made for a very wet meal!
It was really tasty, though. So, yay!
Hey Peter (and everybody else who tried this recipe)!
Thank you for cooking along! I probably should have mentioned that Nepali-style dal is a very soupy dish, almost more of a sauce for rice than anything else. Which, from what I know about the history of curry (the dish and the concept and whatnot) makes it sort of a throwback to the original dishes given that name (putting big chunks of meat in was only for rich people, then English imperialist colonizers, then neocolonialists and tourists, which might be the same thing depending on your interpretation).
You did mention the soupiness (first sentence under “Take 2″); I just a) wasn’t expecting it to be quite so soupy and b) wanted something less wet, since I already had a pretty wet dish. It does seem to “dewetify” well, so I suspect that anywhere from 3-6 cups of water could produce an acceptable dish, depending on the cook’s preferences (which makes it a more versatile dish, now that I think of it).