Cookbook Survivor: Nash Patel and Lesa Scheintaub, Dosa Kitchen
Inexperienced Dude Vs. Dosa Batter
This is absolutely a survivor round. If this book fails me again, it’s in the discard box.
Here’s the deal. I like dosas! They’re a South Asian crepe, basically, stuffed with a wide variety of good things and generally eaten by hand, often as street food.
I came across this cookbook and said, in a mood of wonder and whimsy, “Ah! Now I shall make dosas too!” So I followed the directions twice in a semi-inattentive way closer to the way I cook rather than when I bake and both times it was a disaster. Nothing even remotely like a dosa cooked on my very dosa-friendly cast-iron crepe pan. Like, a disaster at the level of “ok, fam, we gotta order bad cheesesteaks from the delivery guys in the suburbs because I made a fried mess of rice chunks and urad dal chunks” kind, which I think was roughly like a snow day for my kid. (“Oh sorry Dad that the dosas didn’t work, maybe you shouldn’t do that again. Actually, no, keep trying! Cheesesteaks are here!”)
So I dunno. The last two times the soaked rice and soaked urad dal that are at the heart of making a homemade dosa came out kind of grainy and watery and never made anything remotely like a batter. Keep in mind that I followed the directions. This time, things are kind of working—the batter mix is fermenting and it seems actually right in textual terms. I set it to fermenting at around 9pm Friday night. Admittedly it’s not 90F as the book suggests is best for fermentation but if that’s a requirement, then I’ll just hold off and make these when I’m really old since that will be the temperature year-round.
I got the sense that doing this from scratch might not be as easy as the cookbook suggests when I asked a clerk in one of the Indian markets around here where the urad dal was and he asked me what I was making. “Dosas!” I said. He looked alarmed and said, “Just buy the premade dosa batter in the refrigerator, it works fine.. You really don’t want to do it from scratch!” So if the cookbook doesn’t survive, I think that’s what I’ll do in the future.
I’m going to make a savory potato mix for the dosas and also the “dosa dog”, basically a hot dog wrapped in a dosa, with the cookbook’s recommended accompaniments. Fingers crossed.