Dosa Review

Dosa are like crepes made from a fermented rice and dal batter instead of flour and eggs. They are cooked to a golden crispiness on an oiled griddle. Typically they are served with a thin stew called sambar, and coconut chutney. There are many variations. Often the dosa are filled with something: spiced potatoes, chutney, sometimes paneer, sometimes meat. But I'm not an expert. My first dosa was in Chicago at a south indian restaurant on Devon St. It was, I believe,   a mysore masala dosa, which has potato and something spicy inside. It was huge, impressive looking, but very hot for my palate at the time. It would be years before I considered dosa again. My current dosa fixation was born when I ordered the simplest dosa on the menu at Namaskar, a nearby indian restaurant. The Sada Dosa arrived loosely rolled, measuring perhaps 30" long, nearly overhanging the edge of the table! So crisp, so simple and satisfying, with a bowl of sambar and chutney; I thought of it for days and weeks afterward. Then a friend made masala dosa for us at her home. Homemade, these were just 9" in diameter, but we ate several in a sitting, hot off the tava. I could eat these every day! Then, on a saturday in February we drove 40 minutes to Dosa Temple in Ashland, MA. Yes, Dosa Temple. But our pilgrimage was not rewarded in the way I imagined: I had planned to order multiple dosas at the dosa temple! But Saturday, we now well know, is buffet time, and no menus were offered. We saw no choice but to be swept into the buffet line with everyone else, loading our plates with idlis (dosa's steamed, cake-like cousins, which deserve a separate post), vadas, manchurian gobi and other sticky-handled buffet offerings. Eventually a waiter came by and dropped two small, evenly golden dosa on our table. Complimentary dosa! But only two. We plan to return to Dosa Temple at an off-buffet time.

Inevitably, we made some dosa batter ourselves.  There is a good recipe in Wild Fermentation, but we also consulted Yamuna Devi's the Art of Indian Vegetarian Cooking. 

Here is our batter after several days of fermentation (aided and accelerated by placing the bowl above an electric space heater set on low):

Not perfect, our dosa-- the first one had the proper golden-ness, but was a bit thick; the last one was undercooked, not golden enough, and maybe too lacy! We'll have to try again.

In the meantime, these are one thing I am quite content to eat in restaurants, cooked to perfection on a 30" tava!

sourdough starter

 

Some weeks ago, I was initiated into the world of sourdough. I have long been interested in it, and every year when blueberries and plums and grapes are around, I think about mixing up flour and water and those unwashed wild fruit and and allowing it to bubble and rise from the wild yeasts on the skins of the fruit. But I never have.

At last, my sourdough dreams were "jumpstartered" when a friend brought us some already-thriving starter in a jar. It came from far downeast, too, which pleased me...

So far we have used it twice, and we have much to learn about its mysterious ways. The bread we made last week was almost unpalatably sour, and lacked salt. We think we know what went wrong: too much time fermenting, not enough salt.... last night, though, we mixed up the sourdough hotcakes from Sandor Ellix Katz' Wild Fermentation, and they are good. 

Sourdough baking requires at least 8 hours of forethought, and I appreciate this change of pace though it is the thing that keeps me from practicing breadbaking regularly. 

The fact remains--good bread is extremely hard to come by. 

Years ago, I worked in a wonderful small bakery of the sort that should be in every neighborhood. Incomparable naturally leavened breads were made fresh each morning, and baguettes twice a day, along with buttery pastries. There were no wholesale accounts--it was all foot traffic-- and it was cash only. Prices were not inflated. The owner had trained at Acme Bread Company. It was a wonderful place that succumbed eventually to owner burn-out (in its place today is a bakery producing comparable-quality pastries--though they rather shamelessly use fresh berries and summer fruits in midwinter--but the current owners are not interested in making bread. I miss the old bakery to this day, but I feel certain that one day we will see more of that sort of place, when the bakers' secrets are more widely known and a whole class of dedicated craftsmen find their place.