Bajinder Pal Singh

:Would you like some Dosa today”, my South Indian neighbour Sailaja asked me. “As many as you can make”, was my instant reply. Instant, because she was planning some instant dosas.
“My mom sent me this stuff”, she said pointing towards the instant rawa dosa mix, “and I have to finish it before the expiry date”, she quipped. But let me warn you, this is an experiment.
I too was experimenting with my first attempt with vermicelli pulao, and I decided to go ahead with my food.
Sailaja (Saili for short) meanwhile had laid out an elaborate table, with coconut chutney, mint chutney, sambhar as well as yoghurt for the dosa mix.
The first signs that things were going wrong was with the coconut chutney. Using a cup bought from Tivoli in Copenhagen, Saili said, “this doesn’t look like a chutney. I think I added more water”. The chutney, well if you like to call it that was so watery that it gave the look of coconut milk. ‘Let’s put it in the freezer and see if it helps in solidifying the chutney”, she added. But this time, my vermicelli pulao was ready and I now joined the dosa experiment, conveniently forgetting the old age adage that too many cooks spoil the dosa.
Dosa, for novices is a South Indian dish, just like the pancake. Except that it is paper thin and very crispy. A plain dosa does not have a filling and is salty. The plate on which it is cooked is very hot, and the batter requires just a minute or so before the golden brown dosas are ready. You have to be very quick, otherwise the dosa starts to burn.
The very first time that Saili added the batter to the pan, it got stuck at the bottom. ‘Oh God! What have I done”, was her response. The experiment seemed to be destined towards a disaster.
The batter was scrapped off the pan bottom, and we tried to taste whatever we obtained from our first experiment. The pan had to be washed, and she returned to the original experiment. Experiment number two was just like number one, except that the realization that it had failed was much faster.
“Did I add too much water to the batter”, she asked. I thought otherwise. “It should be thicker”, I quipped. But this is not regular dosa, but rawa dosa and it should be thinner, she averred.
This time she added more water to the batter, and tried again. Experiment number 3 was equally worse. She blamed the pan for its poor quality and I blamed the induction heating system as we compared the Indian hot dosa plate to the Dutch pans.
As we tasted it for the third time, Saili remarked, “This tastes like Upma rather than a dosa”.
The word upma led to a brainwave. Let us cook upma instead. So we shifted out stuff from the first burner to the second one, used a fresh pan and poured the entire batter into it at one go.
This did not help either. As the bottom portion of the batter was getting cooked, and the top layer remained liquid, experiment number 4 was also going for a toss.
Saili waited patiently stirring it continuously till the entire batter had acquired a slightly more solid consistency. We tasted a little portion, added some mint and coconut chutney (right from the freezer) and tried it. It wasn’t good.
And suddenly Saili had another bright idea. “Now that the entire batter is thick, maybe we can turn this upma into a dosa again”. She quickly moved to the third burner, took another fresh pan. As she added some oil and let it simmer, I remarked, “We started from the first burner and you have already reached the third”, I remarked. Wait till we cross the fourth and last one to the sink, she laughed.
Already wiser from her previous experiment, Saili tried to roll the mushy upma into a circular roti. She tried making a dosa out of an upma, but did not realize that the batter was now so thick, that it looked more like an uttapam rather than a dosa. The uttapam too was a disaster. Experiment number 5 had failed as well.
By this time, our friend from Colombia, Gina had arrived. As Saili apologized profusely for her disastrous food, Gina came up with a cracker of an idea. Let us fry everything. This time, with one cook extra, we moved to the fourth and last burner. The bottle of oil was now emptied into the pan. She rolled the dosa turned upma turned uttapam into small balls and fried this.
“This is a vada”, I shouted. YES, Saili joined in chorus and we celebrated our experiment together. Gina tried rolling the dough into flatter balls, and this time, the overheated oil ensured that the vada balls starts to swell. “Hey, this looks like a puri”, Saili suggested.
Well, whatever it was. This was the final burner, and we were now running out of batter as well.
So a few puris and vadas, with lots of unsuccessfully frozen coconut chutney and our meal was ready. The dosa turned upma turned uttapam was now in its new incarnation - puri vada.
Bon Appetit.

Labels: dosa, puri, upma, uttapam, vada