Yeasted idly / dosa batter

I saw monthly mingle challenge in Kulsum's blog to be yeast. I thought of making naan with yeast but was sure that many would come up with it. So I narrowed my thoughts to make something South Indian. I get tons of emails from non-Indian friends to give them an easy dosa batter recipe. I can understand that grinding the batter and fermenting it is tricky for total newbies and it is intimidating too. So I called up my mom asking her for instant dosa batter recipe with rice flour and urad dhal flour. She said yes that should be simple, just mix and try it. The urad dhal is used as a binding agent which will help to get the shape of a dosa, she tutored me. But she was wrong, just mixing the two flours didn't work. We discussed that adding yeasts like she does to her appam batter might work. "Try adding little yeast and may be semolina too", she suggested. After few trials and errors, we came up with this ratio: equal portions of rice flour, lentil flour and semolina. I have tried making idlies with it. They were good too.

Now as I am typing the post, I hopped over to Kulsum's page to get the event page link but as I read it now, it said "yeasted dough" as the theme. Blame my concentration ability with a nine month old infant by my side.  My dish is not eligible for the event as I have a yeasted batter :-(

The traditional idly/dosa is gluten free but in this recipe, I have used semolina, so this particular post is not gluten free. I will try to come up with a foolproof recipe with just rice and urad dhal flours. For the gluten free version, see here.

Until then, please enjoy this version of my oothappam.

Makes 8-10 chunky uttapams

Ingredients

1 cup rice flour

1 cup urad dhal

1 cup semolina - idly rava (preferable) or upma rava

1/2 teaspoon yeast

1 teaspoon sugar

1 teaspoon salt

1-2 cups warm water

For the tempering:

1teaspoon mustard seeds

1 teaspoon cumin seeds

1 teaspoon ginger - minced

6-8 curry leaves - chopped

1 small onion - chopped

1 green chilly - chopped

1 teaspoon oil

Method

Use a large vessel to avoid spilling. The batter will rise high after the fermentation time.

Place sugar on a clean bowl. Pour 1 cup warm water (about 100'F) and stir to dissolve the sugar. Then add the yeast, it will get frothy. This will activate the yeast. Add the flours and keep whisking as you pour water. Start with 1 cup water and work your way up by adding little by little water.

Mix well and let it ferment overnight. I placed them inside the oven (leave the oven door partially opened).

Following day, heat oil until they smoke. Then add the mustard seeds and cumin seeds and cook for 45-60 seconds. Now add the onions, green chillies, curry leaves and ginger. Add this mixture to the fermented batter.

I served with my achi's South arcot egg curry. Will share the recipe very soon.