Tamil & the South · Bread
Kal Dosai
- Advanced
- 45 min
- roughly 2 of 4 for cost
- Vegetarian
- Vegan
Leads with richness that coats and comforts.
Ingredients
- 300 g parboiled idli rice
- 100 g raw rice (pacharisi)
- 100 g whole skinless urad dal
- 5 g fenugreek seeds
- 30 g thick poha (aval)
- 10 g rock salt
- Ice water for grinding, about 350 ml
- 60 ml gingelly oil, for the griddle
- 1 onion, halved, for wiping the iron
Equipment
Skillet
The skills inside
FermentationGriddle & plancha workProofing: the rise before the oven
Allergen screen
None found among the 14 screened.
Screened for: gluten, dairy, egg, nuts, peanuts, fish, shellfish, molluscs, soy, sesame, celery, mustard, lupin, alcohol. Not screened: sulphites.
Screened by keyword from the ingredient list, not reviewed by a person; check every label for what the list cannot show.
Method
- Soak both rices with the poha in one bowl and the urad dal with the fenugreek in another, 5 hours, until the dal crushes clean. 300 min
- Grind the urad with ice water until it is white and aerated and floats in water; grind the rice finer than you would for idli, until no grit catches on a fingertip. Fold the two together by hand.
- Ferment at 26 to 30C (79 to 86F) for 8 to 12 hours, until doubled and ringed with bubbles at the edge of the bowl. 600 min
- Stir the batter down, salt it, and thin with water until it falls off the ladle in a ribbon like thin cream.
- Heat a cast iron griddle until a flicked drop of water skitters and vanishes in two seconds. Splash a palmful of water on, wipe it dry with the cut onion, and pour a ladle at the centre, spreading outward in one tightening spiral.
- Drizzle gingelly oil around the rim and cook until the edges lift free on their own and the underside is lacy and red gold.
How to tell it is going right
This dish has no standard of its own yet. It is judged on the techniques it exercises: checked at the pan, while there is still something to be done about it.
Griddle & plancha work 45 recipes
- Full contact with the metal: the food lies flat, with no dome in the middle and no curled edge lifting it away, so browning reaches the entire face rather than a ring of it.
- Contact is immediate and audible, and the food stays where it is put rather than sliding around in a slick of its own released liquid.
- The cooked face is an unbroken sheet of even colour: the whole surface browned, not a pattern of marks with pale ground between them, and not a dark centre with pale corners.
- The metal around the food is dry: no spreading wet patch steaming out from under it, nothing weeping onto the surface and boiling there.
- Turned once or twice and no more, and lifted while the crust is still brown: a piece flipped repeatedly never holds heat long enough to build one.
Where it goes wrong The surface was crowded and its temperature crashed, so everything gave up its water at once and stewed on the metal: pale, damp, grey at the edges, and stuck fast where the crust never got the chance to form.
Fermentation 53 recipes
- Held somewhere with a steady temperature it can actually work at, chosen on purpose rather than wherever there happened to be room.
- There is visible activity before it is called started: bubbles, rise, or movement in the liquid. A ferment showing nothing after its first hours is not slow, it is not going.
- It smells clean: sour, yeasty, or alcoholic, with nothing putrid, and with nothing fuzzy or coloured growing where air meets it.
- Everything is under the liquid or under a cover, as the method requires: nothing solid left sitting dry in the air to spoil while the rest works.
- Judged by taste and behaviour and then STOPPED: chilled, baked, or refrigerated at the point wanted, rather than left running because the stated hours had not elapsed.
Where it goes wrong It was run on the clock in a kitchen colder or warmer than the recipe assumed. Fermentation is a rate and not a duration, so the same number of hours gives an under-developed ferment in a cold room and a slack, over-soured one in a warm one, and only tasting it would have said which.
At the Table
- The Pour
- Grüner Veltliner
- Also Right
- Vermentino or dry Chenin
- From the Taps
- Saison
- Zero-Proof
- Sparkling water with citrus & herbs
The vegetable whisperers: peppery, high-acid whites that flatter greens, roots, and grains without bullying them.
Saved on this device and kept across visits: export from My Menu to move them.