Dosa is an Indian flatbread made from just fermented rice and lentils, water and salt. It's exceptionally crunchy, slightly tangy, and utterly delicious. It's usually eaten with a chutney, raita, or some spicy potatoes.
I made mine with raw short grain white rice and raw black lentils (it's usually made with black gram, which is not that readily available in the shops here). I soaked rice to lentils using a 3:1 ratio overnight. The next day, I blended the rice and lentils with as little water as possible to make a thick pancake-like batter.
I left this to ferment at about 18-20 degrees room temp, so it took me a full 24 hours. I know that this can go as quickly as 6 hours at higher temperatures. When the batter is well fermented, it is bubbly and foamy.
Once it's ready, add some salt and make the dosa over a low/medium heat pan. Use a spoon or the bottom of a measuring cup to spread a ladle of batter outwards from the centre of the pan, as thinly as possible.
It's so, so, good. It really is concentrated sourdough bread in a crunchy, crepe form, except it's gluten free and requires very basic ingredients.
A thick dosa batter can be steamed to form idlis. I decided to try baking my dosa batter in a small tin to see if a nice gf bread crumb could be achieved. Indeed!
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Hey, hey, very nice indeed! And I would never have thought of trying to make a loaf with the batter. Great!
TomP
I was just too curious not to try! Especially after having played around with the 100% ground rice loaf last year. This dosa loaf definitely beats that in terms of flavour.
Beautiful! Somehow, I never realized that all the idli I ate in India was not 100% rice. I guess I wasn't food-aware at the time. And I was too busy marveling that my friends ate idli, which to me seemed perfect finger food, with a fork or spoon while they ate messy rice & curry with their fingers.
Rob
No wonder you marveled. That just seems like too much work to me!
There would definitely be idli made with just rice, though the rice/lentil combination is more common. I wonder if it's the lentils that kickstart the fermentation.
Lovely story Lin, see that you finally made the threatened dosa! What an interesting bread you got out of it, maybe worth making on its own.
-Jon
This is probably the edgy sourdough sibling to the 100% rice loaf we made last year. But unlike that, this really doesn't need sugar or IDY.
I have a feeling that this dosa batter is essentially a sourdough starter. If a little of it were kept in the fridge, it would be able to kickstart further GF products or dosa batters. I haven't looked carefully into this though.