[Anupy] On today's show I'll share how simple lentils and beans can turn into the centerpiece of a delicious Indian meal, and we'll crisp up some papad the traditional way, for a quick and easy snack.

All that and more coming up on "Indian As Apple Pie."

I'm Anupy Singla, cookbook author and journalist.

I was born in North India and raised in Pennsylvania, with a foot in both cultures.

Growing up in suburban Philadelphia, I learned English from "Sesame Street," and Indian cooking from my grandfather.

Homemade Indian food always brought our family together.

It's why I'm so passionate about preserving our culture and recipes, so that everyone can learn how to make delicious Indian food at home.

This is "Indian as Apple Pie."

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Dal is at the heart of Indian cuisine.

No matter how elevated our table gets, we always have a bowl of steaming, fragrant, comforting legumes on that table.

And what's a legume?

It might feel a little complicated.

It's really not, I promise.

Anything that grows in a pod, seeds that grow in a pod, are legumes.

So, beans are a legume.

Lentils are a legume.

Peas are a legume as well.

Now when you cook those legumes in just water, it might feel a little uninteresting, but when you add the spices and the other ingredients, that is when the magic happens and the flavors start to explode.

What I want to do for you is, I want to show you exactly how to make a perfect Indian dal every time.

I truly live for the dal section in my Indian grocery store.

Look at all of the different options and possibilities.

If we go over here, you'll see one of the most common dals in non-Indian grocery stores is the masoor dal split and skinned, kind of orange in color.

But from here, you'll find even more options.

You've got Moong Dal over there.

We've got chana or chickpeas on the other side.

Now this seems overwhelming, but it's truly not.

It's incredibly well organized.

You want to look for the main name of your dal.

You'll find it in different forms: whole, split, split and skinned, and various other forms as well.

You're going to grab whatever you need, and then I'm going to show you how I organize this in my own kitchen and my pantry.

We're in my pantry, and we're going to be talking about storing dals.

Dals are so varied, and you bring them all home in bags and then you wonder, how do you actually store them?

How do you store them so you can see them easily, use them and grab them as you need?

Well, I love glass jars.

I love tall glass jars.

You can reuse your glass jars if you want.

You can also use Mason Jars.

They're really easy to see this way.

And I like to keep all my dals separated because all these legumes and lentils use different amounts of water to cook, they have different cook times, so it's really nice to keep them separated on the shelf.

Another thing that I wanted to kind of bring up is we always tend to gravitate in the United States toward the orange masoor dal.

It's very common.

You see it at the grocery stores all the time.

It's not the one dal that we cook the most often.

Today, I want to show you the most commonly cooked and eaten dal in Punjabi households, and that would actually be the Moong Dal.

It's the split and skinned mung, which is yellow, but it comes from the green whole mung.

But we're going to show you how easily you can cook it up and get it on your table.

We're now going to go ahead and cook our dal.

It is so easy to do.

One thing though you want to start with is of course washing it.

I know it sounds really basic, but I want to show you so you see exactly how I do it.

I just pour a cup of dal into the bowl.

I'm going to just kind of get in there and massage that dal until we feel like it's nice and clean.

This is a very easy fast-cooking dal, so you don't need to soak it.

Others, I would soak.

I would also rinse them first and then use fresh water to soak, but this one we're just going to go ahead and drain this water.

And then we'll take this and put this into our pot.

Now, something that's really important is, and I always like to talk about this.

I really want you to use a roomy pot.

The roomier the better because your lentils and your beans, they expand as you cook them.

If you don't get them into a pot that's big enough to hold them as they're cooking, they are kind of constricted.

So, just get a roomy pot and get your legumes in there.

This is a very brothy recipe, so it's really soupy, really brothy.

And that's another thing that a lot of folks don't realize that are new to Indian cooking: you need a lot of water.

So, this is one cup of dal, one cup of split mung, and I'm going to use six cups of water.

We want this dal as it cooks to cook down and to become very porridge like in consistency.

It's okay if it cooks down and becomes mushy.

That's how we like it.

It's almost like a soup that we eat over our rice, or we dip our bread into.

And now we're going to put the lid on, and we're going to let this sit on our stove and simmer for 30 minutes.

Now, while the dal cooks, we're going to make what's called our tarka, it's our spice infusion.

Remember, the lentils, the legumes, are cooking in water.

There is no extra flavor in there.

It's very bland, but this is where all the magic is going to happen right here.

So, let's do it while we've got some time to wait for them to cook up.

We'll grab our onion.

I like to go for a yellow onion because it's not as sweet as a white.

Or you can try red onion.

Alright, so let's get our onion all over here.

Now, let's go ahead and work on our chilis.

The chilis that we like to use in Indian cuisine generally are serrano or Thai chilis.

Unlike other cuisines, we want to keep the insides.

We want to keep the seeds.

We want to keep the membrane.

We cook with all of it.

It's absolutely fine.

Full of tons of flavor.

If you don't want all the heat, not a problem, just put them in whole, take them out at the end, and you'll have all the flavor without the heat.

The key on the chili is the more we mince it and work with it, the more heat we're releasing.

But you can still get the flavor without all that heat.

Not a worry.

Just go ahead and put this on the side of our plate.

Remember, another thing to make successful tarka is, all of these ingredients are sitting on this plate together.

They're going to go in at different times.

It's really important and critical when we start cooking.

As far as I'm concerned, no Moong dal is complete without ginger and garlic.

So, let's include some.

Today though, we're going to include it in a slightly different way.

Instead of mincing it with a knife, we're going to go ahead and put it in a food processor.

So, let's go ahead and get a little piece of the ginger.

About an inch long on the ginger.

Three cloves of garlic.

And it doesn't seem like a lot, but it's a lot of flavor.

You're going to get amazing flavor from just this little amount of ginger and garlic and our onion.

When you grind it like this, what that helps you do is get your curry closer to silkiness and smoothness at the end.

Now, we're making a dal, not technically a curry or gravy, but really essentially the brothiness of whatever you're making when the ingredients are smoother is on the end when you're eating it.

So, that's why sometimes l like to use the food processor.

So, we've got our ingredients prepped.

Now, we want to actually make the tarka.

That is going to be the magic as I always say.

So, we've got a small pan, a shallow pan heating.

It's on medium high.

And we're going to start by adding two tablespoons of ghee.

Ghee is clarified butter.

Why do we use it?

Well, it increases the smoke point.

So, it's great to get this in here when you're cooking at these high temperatures and you don't have your butter burning.

If you don't want to use ghee, not a problem.

Get some oil, vegetable oil.

You can use some grapeseed oil.

Avocado oil is a good one.

It's a high smoke point oil.

Lots of options.

So, we've got this nice and warmed up.

It's melted in the pan.

A little bit of asafoetida or Hing.

If you don't have it, don't worry.

Then we're going to go to our spice box because this has all of the needed spices in it.

A teaspoon of cumin seed.

And I want to work fast because I don't want anything to burn.

The aroma is already coming off this pan.

The memories of when I was little growing up, this is what we had cooking in our house every single day.

You've got half a teaspoon of turmeric powder going in there.

And now we've created a base on our tarka for our other ingredients.

Let's give this about 40 seconds for the seeds to sizzle and become reddish brown.

And then the first thing we want to put in here is the onion.

I like the onion separated because onion has... [onions sizzling] I love that sizzle.

So amazing.

But I like the onion going separately because the moisture it gives off then cooks off for me, it enables the onion to brown up a little bit.

And then I can add the other ingredients, our ginger garlic.

But if you add it all together, you never really get that onion, I feel, browned enough.

Two to three minutes to get the onion nicely brown.

If you can master this technique, you can make just about any dish in Indian cooking.

It's so simple.

Our ginger garlic is going to go in next.

When you're cooking the ginger and garlic, just make sure that you cook it enough.

Two to three minutes maybe just to make sure you get rid of that sharpness.

I can smell that sharpness coming off the ginger.

You don't want to bite into it.

It should not be raw when it's going into your dal.

Now that we've cooked it, let's go ahead and add our chilis.

And again, cook these for about a minute or two.

Same idea, you don't want that sharpness.

You want to mellow out these flavors.

So, we've got our basic fresh ingredients cooked down.

I like to add my spices now.

So, we want to go ahead and add in our garam masala, which is a North Indian spice blend.

About a teaspoon.

You can add a little bit more if you wanted.

I've got some coriander powder, which is very light and bright and citrusy almost.

I've got my chili powder.

That's about a half teaspoon.

And let's go ahead and add the salt right here.

We can add it in later, but we'll do it right here.

You could have added these spices into your pot of lentils as well, but for me I prefer that the spices cook a touch as well.

They're powders, so I didn't really put them right in, but I got my powders in now to just cook a touch.

So, this is what I like to refer to as mud masala.

It's deep, lots of flavor, everything's cooked down.

Looks so beautiful.

This is all of the flavor that we're going to take and capture and add into our really plain pot of dal, right?

So, we cooked in just water, but this is what is going to create all that magic.

Our dal looks beautiful.

It's not done yet, but if we look at it, you'll notice that it is simmering.

It is really brothy, and it's exactly the consistency that you want.

And part of the surprise is we used six cups of water for just one cup of dal.

I mean that's crazy to make a meal for an entire family this way.

So, let's go ahead and just make it a little bit smoother with a whisk.

I like to go in here and just blend it down a little bit.

I want to keep it nice and creamy.

And now we want to add all of our amazing flavor.

So, let's go ahead and grab our tarka, and we're going to put it all in.

See how all of that deliciousness just hits the pot and hits the dal?

It looks so good.

Let's give this a stir, and let's see the magic unfold.

And there's that yellow that I really want.

There's that little bit of ghee, that's now separating at the top.

Now, to get it to the very end, I just like to hit it with a little bit of cilantro.

Fresh cilantro is just so amazing.

It gives you that extra little tiny layer of flavor.

I like to keep my cilantro in a glass jar.

A little bit of water at the bottom, stick it in the fridge and it will stay fresh for weeks.

And then just take a little bit, you can chop it up, or rip it apart, throw it in here.

And just like that you've got a beautiful comfort meal for your family any day of the week.

Nothing tastes better with a perfectly executed dal than basmati rice.

Basmati is fragrant.

It's very long grain.

And there's an art to cooking it.

We don't just make it.

We make it with spices.

Just like everything else we layer these flavors.

And I'm going to show you exactly what to do.

I've got some rice here and it's going to go into this pot.

but we've going to prep it just a little bit just like we do with other Indian dishes.

We're going to make something like a tarka.

We're going to add in either a ghee or I've got some oil here.

It's just a vegetable oil.

And we'll go ahead and put two tablespoons in there.

Let that warm up.

And then our spices are going to go in.

What I love about rice, a really good Punjabi North Indian rice, is we do a combination of cloves, black cloves.

They're whole.

We never use powder.

Cinnamon stick, and then a spice you may not be familiar with, cardamon pods.

But these are black cardamon pods.

They give it a woody, delicious, amazing flavor profile.

So, we'll just put those right in.

And then let's go to our spice box and grab some of our cumin seed.

Just a little over a half a teaspoon, maybe a teaspoon.

We'll let that warm up, and we're going to stir it so that the cinnamon stick in here, all the spices hit that warming, amazing oil.

And what that does is, it pulls out the essential oils from our spices, and now we're infusing the oil, the cooking oil, with the flavors of the spices.

A lot like garlic and oil for Italian cooking.

It's similar.

We want that oil to be infused with all the amazing spice flavors that we've got in there.

Now, we want to add the rice.

Just add little bit at a time.

Stir it.

Keep it moving.

There we go.

Get it all in.

We've got to work fast.

Simply stir so that all of those flavors mix in with the rice.

You want it to just cook a touch to become slightly opaque.

And if you want to, add a little bit of salt to it.

I always just add a pinch to add in those layers of flavor.

We've got the rice cooking.

It's warming up, and now we want to put the water in.

Remember, it's always one cup to two cups water.

We had two cups of rice.

We've got four cups of water.

Fork that all in there and let this water come to a boil.

I know a lot of folks ask me how to cook perfect rice.

It's all about just letting it do it's thing.

Just not touching it.

Leaving it alone.

I know it's hard.

I always want to kind of get in there, give it another stir.

You don't want to do that.

We're just going to let it come to a boil, and then what we'll do is we'll put a lid on it.

Turn the heat down.

Let it simmer about nine to 10 minutes.

As you can see, it's just about there.

We have the spices that we cooked with up top.

But you do want to take out, remove and discard the cinnamon, the cardamon pods.

You don't want anyone to bite into those.

Let's get a fork in there, and let's fluff it up a little bit.

Look how beautiful this looks.

Oh my gosh, it's so delicious.

Just take a little bit out for a quick taste.

It's so delicious.

Very nutty because of the cumin seeds.

And you can taste the cloves.

The black cardamon pod gives it this woody sort of taste profile.

It's going to be the perfect backdrop for our dal.

I don't know if you've ever seen these, but they are thin lentil wafers.

Sometimes they add in other ingredients, mostly lentils.

They're dehydrated and dried.

They're called papad or papadum.

You can buy these from the Indian grocery store.

You've probably had them in an Indian restaurant deep fried, but we're going to make them the way we make them at home.

We love to have these in our house because we not only eat them with our meals, we like to have them as a crispy crunchy snack.

So with a drink or after work.

If you just want a quick snack, kind of like peanuts and beer, get some papad crisped up.

And the way we crisp them up, we're not softening them.

We're crisping them.

We put them on a flame, and the trick is in the wrist action, just to keep it moving so that nothing burns.

You see how beautifully it'll crisp up.

You can actually, don't worry, do this also on an electric stove.

Just use a diffuser, and then do this right on top.

I've seen folks do it in their microwave as well.

But I like it right on a flame.

And you can smell all of that warmth.

We like to get the black pepper very spicy ones.

And look how beautiful that crisped up.

We're just going to make a stack and save it for dinner.

Now, what I used to do when my kids were little, I'd crisp these up, crack them up, put them in a little bag for them.

They would take it to school and have them for lunches.

So, better than a potato chip.

It's not deep fried, but again, in the restaurants they do deep fry them.

You can do that, but this is as delicious if not better.

So, after they cook, you let them sit and they crisp up beautifully.

Look how gorgeous they are.

And what I like to do is just break off a piece.

They're very spicy because they are the black pepper ones.

As you can tell, there's a theme in our household here.

Anything that is spicy, we will eat.

You can buy plain ones.

You can buy ones that are flavored with other things, other ingredients.

But, these just a great way to very quickly and easily get a little bit of crunch into your meal, so, taking your Indian food to a whole other level.

Use it as a snack.

Scoop up salads with it, chutneys, anything you like.

Now, let's put together this delicious, delicious meal.

We've got our basmati rice perfectly cooked.

And we're going to ladle our dal, our moong dal spice so perfectly on top.

That's perfect for serving.

We'll add a little bit of Indian pickle because we love that layering of flavors.

We'll put some on the side here.

Let's get a small piece there.

This is a lemon achaar.

Very easy to find in an Indian grocer.

Some onion right there.

And then, let's get our papad.

This is how I like to serve it.

I just like to take some at the very, very end and sprinkle it on top for crunch.

It's so fun.

Kids love this.

My kids grew up on this, and they love that extra layer of crunch right on top.

Alright, so let's give this a taste.

I'm so excited.

It looks amazing.

I want to make sure we get a little bit of papad in there.

Remember, those taste profiles come in at every bite.

This is a complete meal in a bowl.

Simple and easy to make.

Your family is going to love it.

[Anupy] I'm all about making Indian cuisine more accessible.

Visit Indianasapplepie.com for more healthy, flavorful recipes, cooking tips, and much more, all rooted in tradition and simplified for our busy lives.

[announcer] This program is made possible by... Leysin American School hosts summer camps for students of all ages in scenic Switzerland.

Golden country Oriental food.

BMO Bank.

Al Sahara.

Handmade rugs.