Dal and kathol questionsદાળ અને કઠોળના સવાલ
Salt is blamed for far more hard dal than it causes, and that question gets a straight answer here. Around it sit the things that do make a difference: soaking times, water ratios and the order the vaghar goes in.
Which dal needs soaking, and for how long?
Mag dal and masoor dal need none; tuvar dal twenty to thirty minutes, chana dal thirty, whole urad overnight. Among the kathol, rajma and kabuli chana want eight to ten hours, kala chana overnight, chowli four to six hours, math six to eight, and val and safed vatana overnight. The split dals have had their skins removed, so water gets to the starch quickly and a soak only evens out the cooking and saves a whistle. A whole pulse has an intact seed coat that water has to cross slowly, and pressure does not speed that up, which is why an unsoaked rajma stays chalky in the middle however long you cook it. Change the soaking water before you cook, and in hot weather soak in the fridge, because overnight on the counter in May will have the pulses fermenting by morning. The common mistake is a short hot soak for rajma, which is not enough.
Why does dal foam up, and should I take the foam off?
The foam is protein and starch washed off the surface of the dal and whipped into a froth by the boiling water. It is harmless and you do not have to remove it, but there are two good reasons to. In an open pot it climbs and boils over; in a cooker it can be pushed up the vent pipe and block it, which is the one genuinely risky thing about cooking dal under pressure. Rinsing the dal through two or three changes of water until the water runs clear takes most of it away before you start. A teaspoon of oil or ghee in the water knocks the foam down as it forms, and keeping the cooker no more than two-thirds full leaves the froth somewhere to go. If you do skim, do it in the first few minutes with a spoon and stop there, because past that you are taking away body rather than scum.
Does salt stop dal and kathol from softening? When should it go in?
No, it does not, and this piece of kitchen lore is worth setting aside. Salt in normal cooking quantities does not keep a pulse hard; if anything, sodium loosens the pectin in the seed coat, which is why a lightly salted soak gives beans that soften a little more easily. What genuinely stops a pulse softening is acid — tamarind, tomato, lemon, kokum, amchur, curd — along with very hard water and the age of the pulse. So salt whenever it suits you. Keep the acid out until the dal or the rajma is already soft, then add it and cook on for a few minutes. Practically, salting early seasons the pulse right through instead of leaving the flavour sitting on the outside, which is worth having in rajma and chana. If something refuses to cook, look at the tamarind and the date on the packet, not at the salt.
My pulses will not soften however long I cook them. Why?
Old stock, nine times out of ten. A pulse that has sat in a shop for a year or two loses moisture and its seed coat hardens, and nothing you do in the kitchen fully reverses it. Hard water with a lot of calcium in it does the same thing, and so does acid added too early. Try this before giving up: soak for a full twelve hours with the water changed once, add a quarter teaspoon of baking soda per cup of pulses to the soaking water, cook in fresh water, and give it half again the usual whistles on a low flame. Soda works by attacking the pectin that holds the cell walls together, but it leaves a soapy taste and a slippery texture if you overdo it, so stay at a quarter teaspoon. Buy kathol in small quantities from a shop that sells a lot of it.
Why does my dal thicken so much after it cools?
Because the starch that dissolved into the water while it cooked sets as it cools, the same thing that makes a cooled kadhi or a cooled khichdi stiff. Hot dal looks right at a consistency that will be too thick an hour later, so cook it a shade thinner than you want to serve it, especially if it is going into a tiffin. To loosen it, add hot water rather than cold and bring it back to a simmer so the starch disperses instead of sitting in lumps; cold water dropped into cooled dal leaves a thin layer on top and a thick one underneath. Check the salt again after thinning, because you have diluted that too. Dal thickens further on the second day and the vaghar flavours fade, so a fresh vaghar of ghee, jeera and hing poured over reheated dal does far more for it than more salt.
My vaghar tastes bitter. What went wrong?
Something in it burnt — usually the hing, the garlic, the methi seeds or the dried red chilli, in that order of likelihood. Hing scorches in seconds and turns acrid; methi seeds are bitter to begin with and go very bitter if they darken past golden; garlic burns long before onion does. The oil was probably too hot. Heat it until a mustard seed dropped in crackles straight away, not until it smokes, and take the pan off the flame for a moment before the quick-burning things go in. Order matters: mustard and jeera first, then curry leaves and dried chilli, then garlic or ginger, then hing last with the heat already low, then the ground spices off the flame altogether. Turmeric and red chilli powder burn almost instantly in hot oil. A burnt vaghar cannot be rescued by diluting it, so throw it and start again; it is a spoon of oil.
How much hing should go in a dal?
A pinch — about an eighth of a teaspoon of the ordinary compounded powder for a dal serving four. The compounded kind is mostly rice or wheat flour with a little resin in it, so that quantity is right; if you have the pure resin or a solid lump, use a quarter of that, roughly the size of a grain of rice, because it is many times stronger. Hing goes into the vaghar at the end, with the flame low or off, and it needs only a few seconds in the hot fat to lose its raw sharpness and turn round and savoury. More is not better: too much hing takes over a dal completely and leaves a lingering harshness that nothing covers. Keep it in a tightly closed container away from everything else, because it will perfume a whole shelf, and buy small quantities since the aroma fades over months.
Why does dal at a restaurant taste different from mine?
Mostly fat, a longer cook and a second vaghar. A restaurant dal often has two or three times the ghee or butter a home dal gets, and fat carries the spice flavours onto the tongue in a way water cannot. The dal is also cooked much longer and usually whisked, so the starch breaks down completely and the texture comes out smooth and glossy rather than grainy. Then there is the finish: many places vaghar the dal twice, once at the start and once with fresh ghee, jeera and hing just before it leaves the kitchen, and that late vaghar is what you are smelling. Cream or butter stirred in at the end, a little sugar and a squeeze of lemon balance it further. At home a whisk, a longer cook and a fresh vaghar poured over just before serving close most of the gap.
Pressure cooker or open pot for dal?
Cooker for speed and open pot for control, and for most Gujarati dal the cooker wins. Inside a cooker the water sits at around 120 degrees instead of 100, which cuts the cooking time by two-thirds or more; tuvar dal that takes forty-five minutes to an hour simmering is done in three to four whistles. Nothing evaporates in a sealed pot either, so the water you put in is the water you get out, which is why the ratios can be fixed. An open pot lets you watch the dal, skim it and stop at exactly the texture you want, and it is the better choice for a dal you want with the grains still whole, or for a small quantity where coming to pressure takes longer than the cooking does. Whole kathol such as rajma and kala chana are genuinely tedious in an open pot — an hour and a half or more, with constant topping up.
How do tuvar, mag and masoor behave differently?
Tuvar is the slowest of the three and the one that needs a soak: twenty to thirty minutes, three parts water, three to four whistles, and it holds its shape until it suddenly goes creamy. Mag dal needs no soaking, takes two and a half parts water and two to three whistles, and stays the mildest of them — it keeps some bite if you stop early, which is why it suits khichdi and a light dal. Masoor is the quickest: no soak, two and a half parts water, two whistles, and it collapses entirely into a thick puree whether you want it to or not. So masoor is wrong for anything where you wanted separate grains and right for a dal you will whisk smooth. Flavour follows the same line: tuvar is the fullest and takes a strong vaghar, mag is delicate, and masoor sits between them and turns a dull brown as it cooks.