HOW TO COOK DAAL
These are the different types of daal most commonly used in Bangladesh cuisine.
Me and Sabrina cooked the orange colored one, masoor daal. Daal is as easy as cooking rice because it involves very little effort and the steps are quite simple.
Ingredients:
-Lentils
-Diced onions
-Diced garlic
-Diced thai peppers
-Cumin
-Turmeric
-Mixed spices (masala)
-Salt
1. Wash the lentils
2. Boil the lentils in water until soft (you can boil it forever, if you want, daal is supposed to be soupy).
In a separate pot, heat oil and then throw in cumin. I eyeballed the amounts of spices I used so I don't have approximates. After the cumin, add onions, garlic, and thai peppers in the oil and caramelize it. Add the remainder of spices as it caramelizes. Once the lentils are cooked, transfer it into the separate pot and bring it to a boil. After that, it is basically done, but how long the daal is boiled is based on preference. I prefer to boil it longer. In this case, I boiled it for about 10-15 minutes.
This was the product of our cooking! It is thick and not soup-like because we used a lot of lentils and we didn't proportion it according to the amount of water we added. The more lentils you put in, the less soup-like the daal will be.
This is another dish we prepared. It's not a traditional dish, but we made it Bengali style in the way we cooked it and with the masalas we used. The ingredients were the same as the daal, except for the lentils. We also used vegetables (yellow squash, acorn squash, and potatoes) and shrimp. This was a spicy dish, which we both relished!
What is a Bengali meal without rice? Rice is present in every meal and is eaten with different side dishes. We ate the rice mixed daal and then with the dish above. In Bangla, the dish above would be called a torkari which can refer to a variety of dishes. I suppose the easiest way to describe what a torkari is would be that it has jhol, the watery sauce like content that sets in the dish while cooking. That jhol remains, either in a low or high amount. It is not stir fry in any sort of way.
Comments
All of this sounds interesting. I think I'll share it with my husband, who does all our cooking, and see if he can try some of this. (We like lentils and rice.)