I love Indian food. I love dal. I have had wonderful dal at many an Indian restaurant. When I lived in London, they even had dal in cans that was pretty damn good.
So, since I can’t afford to eat out all the time, and I’ve never found canned dal in America, I’ve tried making my own. This one, specifically.
But while it seemed to have all the necessaries to be wonderful dal, it’s bland as hell. I admit I skipped the cilantro and jalapeno, because I’ve never had or even heard of dal with jalapeno, and I didn’t have cilantro – but I’ve never noticed that cilantro had a particularly strong flavor, either. I’ve had salsa with cilantro in it, and I can’t even taste it over the onion and hot peppers.
After tasting, I threw in a whole bunch of curry powder, which kinda-sorta helped, but it was still nowhere near as flavorful as the stuff I can get in restaurants. So does it need more spices? Different spices? Is the cilantro way more critical than I think it is? (Isn’t cilantro largely used for Mexican cuisine, though?)
I’d like to try making this again for dinners this week, but I’d like it to taste maybe somewhat better than the standard Kaio-can’t-cook-to-save-her-life fare. I’m so tired of boring food, and I still can’t afford to eat out all the time so I can have food with flavor.
Cilantro (coriander leaves) is a pretty important ingredient in a lot of indian cuisine, but its absence wouldn’t make your Dal bland, just unbalanced. One problem with the recipe that I can spy is they want you to boil your spices. Seeing as how turmeric and cumin are highly aromatic that’s going to almost entirely kill their flavor. I wouldn’t boil the ginger either, just to be safe.
Make sure you’re seasoning your rice with salt when you cook it, too. Rice can suck up a lot of flavor, especially if it’s unseasoned. Also, IME most recipes need to have their spices and herbs doubled, at least, and I certainly wouldn’t trust less than a teaspoon of cumin and ginger to season all those lentils.
Get a small, hot, red chili instead of a jalapeno. Anaheims are good.
Reading the reviews, there seem to be a lot of complaints that that recipe is a bit bland for many people’s expectations. However, a (purportedly) Indian reviewer there says that dal is not supposed to be heavily spiced, and that the recipe is pretty much where it should be in terms of spice level. If you want to doctor it up, you can try adding curry powder or paste (or make your own masala, plenty of recipes available online) and add it to the onions and oil after frying the onions up. A lot of those spices dissolve better in oil than in water and become much more flavorful that way.
Second, every dhal I’ve seen made in a traditional manner had some turmeric and ground spices added to the lentils as they were cooking, but then had some combination of mustard seeds, whole cumin seeds, curry leaves, dried chillies, garlic paste, ginger paste or other spices fried off in very hot oil. These spices were then stirred into the dhal at the last minute to add a flavour kick.
Madhur Jaffrey is a very popular English Indian chef (She is actually Indian). That’s one of her recipes for Chana Dal. Personally I haven’t used it, but it pretty much is the same as the various recipes I’ve seen in the past.
When I make daal, it’s about the same as that recipe, except -just about twice as much cumin and tumeric, added after everything else is pureed - and I use one single serving can of tomato juice instead of diced tomatoes.
When you heat up the oil for the onions & garlic, toss in 1 tsp cumin seeds first. Let them cook maybe 30 seconds. They should snap & splutter a bit. Then put in the onion & garlic.
Use fresh ginger, not ground. Try about 1-2 tsp. Put it in with the onion & garlic.
Use 1 tsp. cumin and, if you can find it, 2 tsp. ground coriander
Add 3/4 to 1 tsp garam masala.
Hey, there doesn’t seem to be any salt in the recipe - I’d try adding it to taste (most dahl recipes I use include 3/4 to 1 tsp)
I’d also add 1/2 tsp cayenne in addition to the chile.
You can also substitute one can of chopped tomatoes for the fresh tomato - I find it can actually enhance the taste because there’s a bit more salt in the canned version and it’s more tomato than you’d probably get including the fresh chopped amount.
Thanks all. I bought some garam masala tonight and will experiment with larger doses of spices and adding most of them at the end instead of the beginning. We’ll see how that works.
I do have a curried squash soup recipe where the curry powder doesn’t go in until the last minute, on top of the sauteed onions/garlic as well, and that always has a nice complex flavor so I’m betting that’s most of it.
I agree that the recipe is bad - dumbed down, you’ll get better results with the boil-with-tumeric-then-add-spiced-oil formulation. However, it might also be an issue that the recipe is for red lentil dal. Not all dals are equal, as you can see another recipe posted here is for channa dal, aka chickpea dal. I frequently see moong or mung dal, made from split mung beans. I can’t vouch for this recipe, but it looks about right.
As others have said, you should make a tarka/tadka - a fried mix of onions and spices - and add it at the end. It is common to boil the lentils with ground turmeric, ginger, garlic & chopped green chilies. When the lentils are soft, mash them. Then prepare the tarka - I like a Bengali-inspired one with panchpuran (lit. “5 spices”): Heat oil with whole, dried chilies and a handful of fresh curry leaves; fry until the chili begins to turn black. Then add sliced onion and panchpuran: a few teaspoons each of whole cumin, fenugreek, nigella, mustard, and fennel seeds. Fry until the onions start to brown and mix the tarka with the dal. Salt to taste, coriander, chopped green chilies and a bit of chopped mint if you feel like it. Enjoy.
Are you remembering to add salt? It isn’t in the ingredient list, but it is mentioned in the instructions. Anything tastes bland if it doesn’t have enough salt.
Jasmine rice here.
I bought a prepared Indian dish, chickpeas in tomato sauce. “Tasty Bite”, I believe. It was awful. A lot of cumin and chickpeas in a runny sauce with a couple of pieces of potato. The sauce was gritty. I have a box of “Savory Lentils in Tomato Sauce”. I believe I’ll try the OP recipe instead.
Second attempt was much much better than the first.
Boiled the lentils with turmeric, salt, and chili powder. At the end I fried up a mess of onions, garlic, and celery (because I needed to use it before it went off on me). Lots of garlic – who in their right mind stops at three cloves? – plus cumin and curry powder and ginger and garam masala. Dump into the cooked lentils stir up (the lentils were tender enough that stirring mashed them well enough), and a couple tablespoons of sour cream because I also had to use it before it went bad. I considered adding some chopped spinach, but as it turns out it had already gone bad. Oops.
Served over brown rice (cooked with a little salt, this time), and while it wasn’t hot by any means, it had a nicely complex flavor… not as good as a restaurant, but a damn sight better than the first time.
Went really well with a nice spicy-fruity red, too.
BTW, a sprinkle of garam masala in your coffee grounds for brewing is pretty tasty, too.
Actually, this was pretty awesome. Normally when I try to get “creative” with cooking (not baking… I’m good at baking, for some reason), I end up with something that’s barely edible. As in, “I’m only eating this because I can’t afford to go to the grocery store again and get enough to start over.”
