While the central and western states use chickpea flour like it were wheat for numerous nutritionally rich breads and other preparations. From the north heralds its most famous preparation, where they are cooked with a rich tomato-onion masala and abundant spices. Served with missi roti (a gram flour bread), and even more ghee, this is a lentil for lavish meals where feeling a little heavy in the stomach afterwards is not a problem! Check out the Indian icon, Tarla Dalal, and her recipe here.Īn intensely protein-rich lentil (or technically a pea), chickpeas have o' so many wonderful uses in Indian cookery. Beloved by the Punjab regions, they soak the lentil overnight and cook it in ghee with tomatoes, onions and an array of spices, before finishing with a ladle of cream. Considered to be more warming than its colourful counterparts, it is as stubborn as it looks, and needs a good cooking. This black beauty is most common to Northern parts of India. Ladled on hot basmati, this simply spells out Sunday lunch in India! These lentils can be a little heavy on the stomach so are often mixed with yellow moong lentils too, and you can see such a dish prepared perfectly here. A simple tadka (‘tempering’) is then applied by frying off a little cumin seed, fresh green chilli, ginger and a little chilli powder, and mixing it in at the end. These Indian lentils are also extremely easy to prepare: wash them 2-3 times until the water goes clear, and boil them with the lid on for around 40 minutes.
In fact, I’d dare say that love for this lentil is one of the strongest glues that binds India together as a country (that and our love for cricket of course…). Right from the tip of Kerela, to the heights of the Himalayas, there would never be a family in India who did not eat these on a weekly (if not daily) basis. Ok, we’ve got a lot of names for this bad-boy, but that’s because these golden goodies are a firm favourite in every Indian household. The secret to their proper enjoyment lies in variety, so here I’d like to share my five favourites to help ignite some good ol’ lentil passion in your spicy heart, and get you mixing up your cheeky shopping basket. We simply can’t get enough of them, from dal in the morning to chana masala at night, we are lapping up the pulses and their colourful abundance. It’s ok though because in India we’ve got this one down! Over half the population (a staggering 600 million people) has been vegetarian for hundreds of years, and if we hadn’t stumbled upon some delicious source of plant-based protein in that time, it would’ve been game-over long ago.
RAJMA CHAWAL HINT IZLE HOW TO
Yet when people don’t eat meat, it is of course the natural curiosity, and I’ve seen many veggie friends not often knowing exactly how to answer.
Where d’ya get your protein huh? Huh punk?Īny vegans or vegetarians will know this as a pretty typical question in their daily life (perhaps not asked quite so dramatically though…).