Rava Dosa is a delicacy in South India. It is a very crisp, thin and porous crepe. Rava dosa is a mixture of 3 components – White Rava or sooji, Rice flour and All purpose flour or Maida – all 3 ingredients come under ‘white’ carbs. So I set out to transform this dish to make it a ‘whole’ grain offering.
Ingredient 1 – White Rava – replace it with wheat dalia (Usual wheat dalia is coarse, run it in a blender to make it similar to rava texture)
Ingredient 2 – Rice flour – replace it with Brown Rice flour
Ingredient 3 – All Purpose flour – replace it with Whole Wheat Flour
DONE – we have transformed a traditional dish to suit our needs yet the taste was practically unaltered. Infact the ‘browner’ color gave it a crispier look.
I use cast iron pans for most of my cooking, I invested in a good double stove griddle and the rava dosa comes out the traditional way. Grease the pan very well and heat it to a medium temperature. Keep the stove on LOW when pouring the batter on to the griddle. The consistency of the batter is runny and settles down. So we mix it thoroughly every time and take ladles from the top and pour onto a hot griddle. The batter will spread around and make the beautiful holes. Add batter as needed to fill up big holes while keeping the smaller ones intact. Season a few drops of oil around the dosa and turn stove to HIGH to cook. Flip the dosa when crisp on one side and turn the stove to LOW. Let it crisp up on the other side and remove from stove.
Use pure sesame oil for an authentic taste.
Rava dosa is served traditionally with coconut chutney, the recipe of which I will post soon.
Whole Grain Rava dosa recipe
Ingredients –
- Wheat Dalia (fine grain) – 1 cup
- Whole Wheat flour – 1 cup
- Brown Rice flour – 1 cup
- Cumin seeds – 1 tsp
- Curry leaves – 2 sprigs
- Green chillies chopped – 1-2
- Salt
Procedure –
- Combine all the ingredients with 4-5 cups of water and mix thoroughly with a fork. The batter will be slightly runny and will settle down when left to rest.
- Grease a cast iron pan with sesame oil to MEDIUM heat and turn to LOW.
- Pour 2-3 ladles full of batter onto griddle in a round direction without touching the griddle, the batter will spread in all directions. Fill up the spaces and create a form for the dosa. Turn Stove to HIGH and season oil around the dosa.
- Turn dosa over when crisp and turn stove to LOW.
- Remove dosa after 2 mins when crisp on other side as well.
- Serve with coconut chutney.
