Tangy Dal

The past few weeks / months I've been working pretty hard to study for two oral exams for my Ph.D. program in Math, which will be held tomorrow. As such (and due to passover) I've been pretty lax about posting and cooking. However, I did manage to make a nice dal a few days ago which I figure I will share (I think I'm done with studying and now I get to relax). I call this a tangy dal since the key flavors enhancing the dal are ginger, tomato paste and a little apple cider vinegar (plus some brown sugar). I decided to try to make something tangy since I remember my old roommate's girlfriend telling me that in Bangladesh cuisine, curries and dals are often tangy, and this sounded interesting to me.
The dal I chose to use was Mong Dal. Its a very small whole lentil which results in a pretty thick consistency when fully cooked. I soaked a cup or so of these over-night. The next day I heated some oil in a pot and added a few bay leaves, and some finely diced dried hot pepper (often people use this whole, but I decided to experiment with dicing it this time), plus half a stick of cinnamon and a few cloves. After about a minute and once the bay leaves began to brown (not burn) I added in some mustard seeds and some cumin seeds and gave them about a minute also. When the mustard seeds started to pop (and when I managed to finish dicing a large onion and some garlic) in when the onion and garlic. Mostly out of forgetfulness, but did not add any ginger at this point. However, in retrospect, my later method in including the ginger worked well, so I might just go with that again in the future.

Once the onions got translucent I cleared a spot on the bottom of the pot and add a little more oil and then the drained dal. The idea was to roast them a little (but it didn't see to work since they were pretty water-logged). I'm not really sure how much water I ended up using, but I would need to guess over two cups. The key was to make sure that the lentils didn't burn on the bottom. After cooking for about an hour and a half, the dal separated and became a thick sauce.

It was also at about this point when I remembered that I should have used some ginger. The difference between a bad dal and a good dal comes in the last minute of cooking. There is only so much flavor which can be imparted to a dal which cooks for about two hours. Solid spices work --- powder spices lose their flavor over the long cooking time. The way to spice dal is, in the end, to add an oil and tomato based spice sauce to the dal. I had run out of onion, or else I would have used some in this, but what I ended up doing is dicing some garlic, and ginger. Then I heated up about two tablespoons of oil, and added some garam masala powder plus a little curry powder to the oil and after a few second of sizzling I added the ginger and garlic. I gave it just enough time for the garlic to begin to brown, before I added in a little over half a can of tomato paste, and mixed this together thoroughly. This mixture then went into my dal and got mixed until well distributed. The final touch was a little brown sugar and a few dashes of apple cider vinegar. The spice level was a little high, so I added a few spoonfuls of yogurt directly into the pot and mixed it up.

This dal keeps for a long time, and can be microwaved in two minutes for a great meal. I had bought a loaf of rye bread from the Jewish bakery nearby, so I used toasted slices of the bread to dip into the dal (though more traditional Indian breads probably work well too).

I think that the tangyness worked well with this type of lentil, though I'm not sure why.

Good points to remember with dal is that a little acid after cooking works well. People often squeeze some lemon into the dal -- I didn't have lemon so I used some vinegar (just a little). Also remember to only use solid spices during the cooking, and afterwards to include the powder spices in the form of a tomato/oil mixture. Also make sure the lentils are fully broken down before adding this mix.