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Masala dosa (stuffed dosa)

Time50 minutes
YieldsMakes about 14 dosas
Masala dosa (stuffed dosa)
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The dosa is a hugely versatile food. In India, it can be a light snack or a meal in itself. It can be made light and lacy or thick and substantial. It can take a simple five minutes to prepare or a marathon 24 hours. Its batter can be refrigerated for a week and still not lose its taste. And it can be made in a hundred different ways, to suit a hundred different tastes.

All of this I know from personal experience. When I was growing up in India, we used to have the most marvelous summer vacations at my grandparents’ rambling house. It seemed to me that at any given time there were a hundred people there--uncles, aunts, cousins, second cousins, widowed great aunts, neighbors and a stray friend or two.

One of the simplest ways of feeding the tribe was to prepare gallons of dosa batter, with gallons of sambar and coconut chutney to go with it. The dosa batter and chutney would be ground in an oversized version of a stone mortar and pestle. Even simpler was making a dosa that could be eaten with just homemade hot mango or bamboo shoot pickles, or with date syrup or honey.

The women of the house would take turns standing over the hot griddles to keep the dosas coming. The children, once they were done eating, were recruited to yo-yo between the dining table and the kitchen with the fresh batches. That we needed urgent refueling for this arduous task was taken as a given, and a handful of banana chips or a cream of wheat ladoo did absolute wonders to keep up our strength.

The secret of the perfect dosa lies primarily in the making of the batter. The sourdough dosa, which forms the basis for the masala dosa and is probably the most labor-intensive of dosas, is made with rice and the legume urad dal (a kind of black lentil). It has to be blended to the perfect consistency and fermented correctly in order to get it right. The warm weather in south India speeds up the fermentation process, but in more temperate climes, it can take up to 12 hours.

It’s a good idea to prepare a small amount of batter to begin with. Make half a batch to start. But even with a perfect batter, the crispy mile-long masala dosa served in restaurants does take a bit of practice--and griddle space--to achieve.

But don’t worry. You don’t need to make it a mile long. It need not be a perfect circle, and it’s allowed to be more than a millimeter thick--even if you’re not cooking for hundreds of hungry relatives.

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1

Boil the potatoes in salted water until tender, about 20 minutes. Drain them, reserving the water. Coarsely mash the potatoes.

2

Heat the oil in a nonstick saucepan over medium-high heat. Keep all the ingredients close at hand. When the oil reaches the smoking point, add the mustard seeds. These will immediately start to splutter and pop. Keep a splatter screen handy to fend off any hot oil burns. When the spluttering eases off, about 5 to 8 seconds, reduce the heat and add the dal and the curry leaves. Fry a few more seconds until the dal turns brown.

3

Add the onions and fry until golden brown, 12 to 15 minutes. Then add the potatoes, turmeric and salt. Mix well. Add 3 to 4 tablespoons of the reserved potato water, mix again and cook until the water is absorbed and the bhaji is fairly dry in texture, 2 to 3 minutes.

4

Cook the Sada Dosa (following the Sada Dosa recipe directions), and as each dosa is finished, spoon about 2 tablespoons of the bhaji onto one half of the dosa, then fold the other half over it. Restaurants often place the bhaji in the center of the dosa and fold the two sides over it to make it rectangular rather than half moon shape. Repeat until all the filling is used.

5

Eat promptly with Coconut Chutney and sambar.

This, basically, is the Sada Dosa with a potato mixture (bhaji) spooned into it. The masala is the icing on the cake, as it were, and lifts the ordinary crepe into something quite special. Having said this I must admit that I have a preference for the humble sada dosa because it is pure, simple and wholesome. Of course, the fact that I once massively binged on masala dosas and suffered its consequences might be a large part of the reason too.