Yeasted ricotta tarragon pancakes

 It seems I love pancakes, both savory and sweet, and I keep making up different combination. This one was inspired from a call with my mom who told me she made the potica with a tarragon filling. I remembered we had a good amount of dried tarragon in our pantry, waiting to be used. I also just acquired a new package of active yeast, so I decided to put the yeast to work.

Ingredients:

• 1 tsp yeast, 1 TBS flour (I used eincorn), a pinch of sugar, and 1/4 cup of lukewarm water
• 1/2 -3/4 cup of rolled oats
• 2-3 TBS buckwheat flour (or any other gluten free flour, or just regular flour)
• 1 egg, beaten
• 1/2 cup ricotta
• A handful or raisins
• A pinch of salt
• 1 TBS honey or sugar
• 2 tsp or so dried tarragon
• milk as needed

Procedure for the batter:

1. Activate the yeast by mixing the yeast, 1 TBS flour, a pinch of sugar, and 1/4 cup of lukewarm water. Let it stand for 5-10 minutes for the mixture to become frothy. I tend to use a smallish bowl for this, but you can also save on doing dishes and use the bowl that will be used for mixing the batter.
2. Mix all the ingredients in a bowl. Add a bit of milk if the batter is very thick and dry. 
3. Cover with a wrap, foil, or a lid, and let stand for at least 30 minutes to a couple of hours for the mixture to rise and become frothy.

Procedure for cooking pancakes:

1. Preheat a griddle or a pan (carbon steel is my preference) on a medium low heat.
2. Add a couple of tsp of oil or butter. I prefer Avocado oil or clarified butter, but really any cooking oil will do the job.
3. Add a heaping soup spoon of batter to the pan, and spread it out so that it is about 1/2 inch thick. Keep adding more pancakes to the pan until you run out of space, but do not overcrowd.
4. Cook for about 3-5 minutes per side, depending on the thickness of the pancake, and on how hot your burner is set. Lower heat is better so that the pancakes cook through.
5. Serve with fresh fruit and maple syrup.

Easy dosa

 I encountered dosa for the first time as a grad student in Waterloo. An Indian restaurant opened in a former fast-food joint, really without any redecorations. The food, however, was fantastic, and the star of the menu was this giant thin crispy sheet with a bit of tasty filling - it was called dosa. It took me years before I even contemplated to make dosa myself. Then I hesitated because I heard one needed to ferment the batter, and the recipe I saw asked for spice called "hing", which I didn't have. I purchased a batter a few times, and finally got the courage to make it myself. 

It turns out, dosa is a very versatile lentil-based pancake. One can use it in a traditional way, with any of the many fillings that came from Indian cuisine. One can also use it as a savory pancake - cheese, ham, mushrooms, scrambled eggs... Any of those filling make a wonderful addition to dosa. One can also use it as an ultra thin base for a pizza. Your imagination is the limit.

Making the filling is also super trivial. All one needs is some lentils and rice, water, and maybe some salt. Everything else is optional. Fenugreek, cumin, sage powder are among the spices I have tried. Each gives dosa a bit different flavor. I also learned that one does not need to ferment the batter. Of course, the sourness from fermentation makes a better dosa, but if one doesn't want to wait, the batter works very nicely even without being fermented.

I think there are a few things that help making dosa easier. One is adding rice - I use the same amount as for lentils. I have made dosa with lentils only - tasty, but much more fragile and hard to make. Two, there is no need to soak rice and lentils separately. Soaking them together eliminates some complexity from the recipe. Three, keep your batter thick enough, but not too thick - it still needs to be pourable. If the batter is too thin, the dosa is more sticky, so one needs to use more oil, and it is also much more fragile. Four, use a carbon steel pan. The pan needs to be quite hot, but not super hot. Then the dosa cooks and crisps nicely, without sticking. Non-stick pans should be used at a lower heat. Five, take your time before flipping dosa. When the dosa cooks sufficiently, it will easily separate from the pan surface and it will be nicely crispy.

Ingredients:

• 1/2 cup dal /lentils. Urad dal is what I prefer to use, but any skinless lentils will do
• 1/2 cup brown rice.
• salt, a pinch or two
• 1.5 cups water
• Optional: additional spices such as fenugreek, hing, sage, cumin,...

Procedure to make the batter:

1. Mix rice and dal in a bowl, and wash them mixture until the water stays mostly clear.
2. Cover the dal and rice mixture with at least 3 cups of filtered water, and let the mixture sit at a room temperature for 4-8 hours.
1. If you let the mixture sit for longer, some fermentation may take place.
3. Drain the water from the rice/dal mixture.
4. Add dal/rice mixture to a high-speed blender, and add 1.5 cups of filtered water.
5. Season with salt and any of the optional spices.
6. Blend until the mixture is completely smooth and has a consistency a bit thicker than the batter for crepes.
7. Transfer the batter into a container that you have a lid for. I like using a glass container.
8. Optionally, leave the batter at a room temperature for 8-16 hours and let it ferment a bit. In that case bubbles will start forming on the surface.
9. Store the batter in a covered container in a fridge for up to a week.

Procedure for cooking dosas:

1. Preheat a carbon steel or cast iron skillet or a griddle on a medium to medium-high heat - you'll need to figure out what setting works on your stove.
1. I usually use a 9.5 inch carbon steel crepe pan. If you use a larger pan and want to make a larger dosa, you need to adjust the volume of the batter used.
2. Add a teaspoon or two of avocado oil (or any high-heat oil) to the pan and swirl it around to cover the entire cooking surface. You can use a silicone brush here, but then you need to use a bit more oil.
3. Fill a 3 oz ladle with the batter, and pour about 4/3 of the ladle worth of batter in the center of the pan.
4. Gently spread the batter around the pan with the bottom of the ladle, using a circular motion in increasingly large circles.
1. Be gentle with the ladle. If you are pressing down, you will create holes in the batter and will not be able to create a uniform paper-thin dosa.
5. Cook until the batter starts to separate from the pan. Use a metal spatula to flip the dosa and cook on the other side for a another 2 or so minutes.
1. In India I saw a cook spread a bit of oil on top of the dosa before flipping it. I have tried that and it surely helps with non-stickiness and crispness of the dosa. But I usually don't do that as my pan is super well-seasoned and this extra oil is not needed.
6. Take the dosa out of the pan, and repeat for more dosas.

Addendum January 2024

After making the dosa with some regularity for a while, I realized a few things: 

One does not need any oil to make dosa. We verified that when we accidentally added batter to a dry pan, which is what we normally do for flatbread. All was well, the dosa was tasty, and we actually liked it better when it was made without oil. Maybe the name dosa did not apply any more, but that is not our focus.

Once I started seeing dosa as just another kind of a flatbread, more experimenting happened. Most notably, instead of soaking and using rice, we tried other grains, in a flour form. Millet and buckwheat are our standards, and they worked well. I tried adding some tapioca starch, and it also worked very well. Ground flax seed is now a standard. For each combination, one needs to adjust the amount of water to get the right consistency, and by now we have built up enough intuition that we do not measure any more.

The other area ares spices: Herbs de provence, granulated garlic, granulated onion, even gochugaru or cayene pepper, everything bagel spice mix and so on, each of those, or a combination, worked really well.

Finally, fermenation is great, but optional. For example, I used red lentils, washed, soaked in hot water for maybe 30 minutes, and then blended. To that I added a combination of flours and water, and made "dosa" immediately. Again I am not sure one can call it dosa at that point, but it surely looks like one.