Video on how to make Ras Gullas

My favorite Indian dessert is Ras Malai, which roughly translated means Sweet Cheese. But to enjoy Rasmalai one has to strart with Ras Gullas, an equally delicious dessert. Ras Gullas are very popular dessert dish in Calcutta (Bengal is famous for its mithai), and I still have very vivid memories of my trips to Calcutta en route to Darjeeling, where we would buy and gulp down syrupy Ras Gullas from hawkers on the Calcutta railway station.

Manjula's recipe below is very simple one, and I recommend it to any one who wants to give it a try. In the video Manjula recommends using cane sugar, by which I suppose she means use cane sugar instead of beet sugar or sucrose. However, if one is diabetic should one give up on eating Ras Gullas? Not really. Feel free to substitute sugar with Splenda or some other sweetner. In India today its quite common to find Indian sweets made from artificial sweetners instead of sugar (India has one of the fastest rising rates of diabetes in urban areas mainly on account of lack change in lifestyle and increasing affluence)

But in preparation of the syrup, you are on your own! Use your normal substitution conversion rate to figure out exactly how sweet you would like it to be.

Here is Manjula's video - Thanks Manjula!!

Step 1 to making Sourdough bread: Making Levain

The first step to baking a sourdough bread is the make Levain or sourdough starter.

The process of making the levain is not totally unlike the process of making the dosa batter. In making the Dosa batter, one grinds the rice and lentils into pancake like batter, and holds it overnight to ferment and become sour. The sourness of the batter comes from the natural wild yeast that exist on grains of rice (rice being carbohydrate, naturally attract yeast). In making levain, we first mix the wheat flour with sufficient water to get a pancake batter like consistency in a large plastic yogurt container. I could keep this overnight and it would probably ferment on its own. But I have tried this in the past and have not succeeded in getting a good fermentation going (in fact it smelled horrible!). I suspect that this is because we have a dog in the house, and the normal flora of the home is probably different from the normal flora of a typical home. So, to get the right strain of yeast, I decided to add a little bit of Fleishman's baking yeast to the batter. Here are the measurements:

1 cup wheat flour (Apna Bazar brand)
1.5 cup filtered water
1/4 tea spoon Fleishmann's baking yeast

Temperature: 27 degrees centigrade (approx 80 degrees F)

We will see what happens tomorrow! Hopefully I will have some pictures to share.

Post hoc - I repeated the steps everyday for three more days (without adding any additional yeast of course) but this sourdough bread baking exercise turned out to be a disaster. The Apna Bazar four is entirely unsuitable for baking a regular loaf of bread, and the bread turned out to be quite flat albeit tangy sour in taste.

Lesson learned - Indian wheat flours are not suitable for baking western style bread. Its whole wheat bread that perhaps does not have the amount of gluten required/needed to make the bread rise and become soft.

Giraffe & Mickey Mouse Dosa or Pancake

One of the joys of fatherhood is the opportunity to make food for kids that is appealing to them. Jaya is rather finicky with her food, and makes me jump through hoops to eat anything that is put in front of her! Then one day I had a brilliant stroke of imagination...how about enlisting Jaya's favorite characters in the task of keeping Jaya well fed? Viola! Out emerges Animal Dosas!

I admit others have thought of this idea before (Animal Crackers, anyone?), but this one involved me having to learn how to pour dosa batter on the skillet in such a way that it retained animal shapes. First one was Mickey Mouse (sorry Disney!) but now, my mastery has gone further into the animal kingdom, and the Giraffe below is an example of just that!

So, how does one make it? Here is the recipe...
Rice: 2 cups
Urad dal: 1 cup (found in Indian grocery stores)
Salt to taste
Skillet, Blender, Oil

Soak Rice and Urad Dal separately overnight. Next morning grind to a fine batter. Add sufficient water to make the final consistency pan cake batter like. Cover the batter and leave it in a warm place (such as an oven with pilot lamp) overnight for fermentation. The next day it should taste sour doughy which means that the batter has nicely fermented. The batter may have also slightly risen during the night. Mix the batter well and add salt to taste.

Making the Mickey Mouse Dosa (Pancake)

On a hot skillet, pour a small quantity of oil and wipe it with a wet cloth. Do this carefully as the skillet is hot and the wet cloth and hot oil combination makes the oil crackle! (don't ask me why I do this - my mother told me this is how is done!)

Take a spoonful of the batter and pour on a hot skillet such that it looks like a nice round pancake. Before the pancake (lets call it pancake 1) gets cooked, pour a little batter just beyond the upper edge of the pancake on the right side till it meets the pancake 1, to make the right ear. Quickly, pour some more batter on the upper left side of pancake 1 to make the second ear. The trick is to pout the batter quickly enough for the three packages to merge into one. Otherwise the ears will fall off when you flip the pancake!

Pour some oil around the edges of the pancake and cover for a couple of minutes. When the pancake is cooked, flip it over carefully without breaking the ears. A minute or two later, the mickey mouse dosa is ready!!

Serve with some sort of chutney - I prefer coconut chutney, but you can serve any chutney found in the Indian grocery store. Kids love to eat this pancake with butter too, so you could just give them a dolop of butter on top of the pancake and they would be perfectly satisfied!

Interesting thing is, now we have Jaya's friends coming over to eat mickey mouse dosa and giraffe dosa! Not only do I get compliments on the dosas, I often get requests to make various other animals! I'll admit that sometimes the requests are difficult to satisfy. But as you can see from the Giraffe dosa, intricate animal dosas are indeed possible! Its just a matter of practice!

Making Injera

Injera is the Ethiopian bread made from "Tef" a type of grain grown in Ethiopia and Eretria. I first tasted Injera in an Ethiopian restaurant named Blue Nile, in the Greek Town, in down town Detroit about 18 years ago when my friend Michael Merta introduced me to this food. Ever since then, Injera has become my favorite bread. Reason being, Injera tastes so much like the dosa from South India - the tangy sourdoughy taste is something to just love! My mouth waters just writing this!

Given that making dosa is my speciality, I have tried to make Injera in the house several times, but each time it ended up a disaster. I wondered, am I not making it correctly? Or is it the dough itself? I realize now that I was perhaps making it all wrong. My Injera was not at all spongy as the one I tasted in Blue Nile. Finally I gave up.

Recently, some how memory of Injera was triggered again, and I decided to Google it to see if I could find better sources. Turnsout, a lot has changed in the last few years, and now there are a few more people than 20 years ago interested in sharing Injera recipes! Here is a very useful link of "Watchwoman"'s blog that lays out how to make the Injera. Warning, the recipe calls for starting at least a week before you plan to make the bread. But it will be worth it!

Also, check out the video below which shows how the Injera is made traditionally. Reminds me so much of back home where wood fire choolah is such a common thing! I am convinced I am going to duplicate this in my house here in New Jersey, for the taste of bread baked in a choolah is just out of this world!



Now all that remains is to make injera myself. So today, I ordered the teff flour from Teff Company and once it gets here, I will let you know how the experiment went.