ADVENTURES IN SPICE
Indian food is one of my favorite cuisines, second or third to Mexican and Szechuan, but I haven’t really tried making any. I had some lentils left over from making my grandmother’s lentil soup (which is for another post), and some spices from making pastilla (a Moroccan savory/sweet pie that I might make again and write about when I do), and so I figured I’d give dal a try.
This particular dal is made with spinach, which is saag in the Northern Indian restaurants I frequent when I can, but it’s called dal palak in this iteration. I’m not really sure why, but most of my foreign language skills involve food and not etymology, so I’ll just file this one away for now.
(I looked it up: Palak is spinach, and saag is just generic cooked greens. The cooked spinach I’m used to eating is therefore palak saag (unless it really is the traditional mustard greens, sarson ka saag. Now I know!)
Everybody has their own recipe for garam masala (literally “hot spices”). I had cumin, coriander, cloves, cardamom, cinnamon, nutmeg, black pepper, turmeric, and aleppo pepper, so I toasted those in a small frying pan. I then pounded the hot spices with a mortar and pestle. (I should get a spice grinder…)
In the same pan that I used to heat the spices, I added some olive oil and sauteed some minced red onion, adding some minced garlic after the onions started to get translucent. There was still a little turmeric in the pan, but it’s all going in the same place anyway, right?
My mom got me an Instant Pot, and so I used the pressure cooker function to cook the lentils. I could have used the other functions available in the cooker to toast the spices and saute the onions and garlic, but I wanted to be able to control the heat more readily, since the spices can burn if you don’t pay attention, and the pan was already being used so why not cook the garlic and onions in it too?
I tossed the onions and garlic into the Instant Pot with the lentils and a tomato cut into six pieces. Since the cardamom pods wouldn’t crush into a small enough size no matter how hard I tried, I sieved the spices into the pot as well, pounded the leftovers, and sifted them again.
I added three cups of water, sealed the pot, and set the timer for 21 minutes. After the timer went off, I turned off the cooker completely. 10 minutes later, I used the pressure release button, and opened the lid. It smelled incredible.
I squeezed a lemon into a small bowl and took out the seeds, and then added some salt to the lemon juice. I threw a couple of handfuls of spinach into the hot dal, which wilted the leaves as I stirred. I finished it by adding the lemon juice and salt, and that made it pretty darn perfect, thanks!. Not bad for my first try at Indian food!
It’s vegetarian, probably even vegan if that’s your kink, and free of a lot of things people seem to be allergic to. It’s not very hot-spicy, but it is incredibly flavorful. Serve with naan or rice.
RECIPE
- 1 cup lentils (I used Bob’s Red Mill brown lentils (kali masoor dal, supposedly?)), picked over and rinsed
- 4 cups spinach, raw
- 1 beefsteak tomato, cut into large chunks
- 3 cups water
- 1/2 red onion, minced
- 5 garlic cloves, minced
- 2 tsp olive oil (or ghee, but then it’s not vegan)
- Juice of one lemon
- 2 tbsp or so salt
- Garam masala (below)
GARAM MASALA
- cumin
- coriander
- cloves
- cardamom pods (I used green)
- cinnamon, freshly grated
- nutmeg, freshly grated
- black peppercorns
- turmeric
- aleppo pepper
Put the lentils and the tomato into the pot of your pressure cooker.
In a small pan, toast the spices for about a minute until they start to become fragrant. Remove from heat, let cool, and then grind in a mortar and pestle or spice grinder.
In the same pan, saute the onion until it becomes translucent, then add the garlic and saute for another couple of minutes. Add this mixture to the pressure cooker pot, and add the garam masala (through a sieve if you have to). Add three cups of water, seal the cooker, and pressure cook on HIGH for 21 minutes.
When the pressure cooking is done, turn off the heat. After 10 minutes, release the pressure manually. Open the pot and stir in the spinach. The heat from the dal will quickly wilt the leaves. Add the lemon juice and salt, stir, and enjoy.
NOTES
You can make this with different types of lentils, but you’ll have to adjust the water and timing to match. Bon Appetit has a good chart for that. I had some chicken stock left over from making soup, and was debating cooking the lentils in that, but I decided to stay vegetarian this time.
This works as a side dish if you’re eating meat as well, but it works fine as a main dish (probably with some starch) if you’re going veg. It is supposedly full of protein and vitamins and all kinds of good things.
Most of my interaction with Indian food has been Northern Indian, but India’s a pretty big place, you may have heard, and food traditions are all over the map. It’s probably a misnomer to call it “Indian food” as much as it is to try to pin down a generic “American food”.
As mentioned above, everybody has their own recipe for garam masala. I didn’t include measurements because, well, I didn’t actually measure them, but also because you can customize it to your liking. You can add bay leaf, fennel or star anise, mustard seed, ginger, saffron if you’re feeling fancy. It all comes down to taste.
I want to make naan one day. Supposedly it can be made with leftover sourdough starter. If I do, I’ll be sure to write about it!