Mung and red lentil dal

December 29, 2013 at 11:30 am (B plus (3.5 stars, like a lot), Beans, Derek's faves, Indian, Website / blog)

I wanted to make mung dal yesterday, but I didn’t have any toovar dal and didn’t feel like making 100% mung dal, and so I went looking for a recipe that uses mung and massoor dal (hulled and split red lentils). I found this recipe for red lentil and moong dal on the Lisa’s Kitchen blog, which is a blog mostly devoted to vegetarian Indian recipe. The recipe is pretty similar to my mung and toovar dal recipe, as you can see below. The main differences are that the mung & masoor recipe calls for more turmeric and mustard seeds, and instead of garlic, shallot, and curry leaves, the sauce is finished with tomatoes, amchoor powder, and garam masala. But actually I forgot to add the garam masala! Other than that I followed the recipe pretty closely, except that I made 1.5x the recipe and kept the oil amount at 2 tablespoons. It was still plenty rich. I also used 5 canned whole tomatoes rather than 3 fresh. We ate the dal for dinner with yogurt. It was supposed to serve six people (since I made 1.5x the original recipe which served four), but the two of us finished off almost the entire pot.  We were hungry and it was very tasty. I’m definitely going to bookmark Lisa’s Kitchen blog to explore in the future.

Rating: B+
Derek: B+

mung & toovar dal (old)	mung & masoor dal (new)
1/2 cup mung dal + 1/2 cup toovar dal	1/3 cup mung dal + 3/4 cup red lentils
2-3 Tbs. olive oil or ghee	2 Tbs. sesame or coconut oil
1 to 1.25 tsp. salt	1 tsp. salt
3 fresh green chilies + 1/2 tsp. cayenne + 2 dried red chilies	2-3 fresh red chilies, seeded
1/4 tsp. turmeric	1 tsp. turmeric
2 tsp. grated ginger	1.5 inch piece ginger, chopped
1/2 tsp. mustard seeds	1 tsp. mustard seeds
generous pinch asafetida	pinch or two of asafetida
3 Tbs. chopped cilantro	handful of cilantro
3 garlic cloves + 1 medium shallot + 8-10 curry leaves	3 tomatoes + 1/2 tsp. amchoor powder + 1/2 tsp. garam masala