Turai Ki Dal

Turai, Thori, Beerakaya, Ridged Gourd is used all over India. However, it is not extremely popular as a tasty dish - I used to get this to eat when I was sick. However, like the Chayote Squash about which I blogged in the last post, Turai is also a mild tasting vegetable. Hence, the flavor of any dish made with it is directly related to what else you are putting in it. So the flavor that you can get is almost unlimited in scope.

Many people dislike Turai due to its thick skin. But we will use it to our advantage to get crisp pieces of vegetable. How do we minimize peeling for Turai ? Just peel the rough sharp ridges. Do not peel the region between the ridges. See the pic below.

Now, Turai is usually cooked with Moong Dal. Instead, we will cook it with a mix of Moong + Toor dal. The Moong + Toor combo is actually a very potent combo in general, which is not fully exploited in Indian cooking. You can bewilder your guests with this dal combo, even the astute ones cannot easy tell what dal it is - especially when you consider that the relative proportions of the dals can be varied to give rise to a large variety of flavors ! Great opportunity to experiment with.

In this recipe, we will take a somewhat brain-dead proportioning - half toor + half moong. Even such a blind guess works out great.

To Pressure Cook:

1 cup Moong + 1 cup Toor

Pressure cook the dals together and in the meantime do the following steps.

To Cut:

1 Turai - partially peeled as shown above - cubed into medium sized pieces as shown below.

2-3 Green Chillies cut into small pieces.

To Boil:

In a large pan, add enough water to just about submerge the turai pieces.

1. Add the chilli pieces and..

2. The turai pieces and...

3. 3-4 teaspoons of Coconut powder (yes !!! coconut powder - on the request of my friend Anshu who wanted coconut and tamarind recipes).

Cover it up and let it boil for 10-15 mins on medium flame. If you are feeling lazy, you can put all the above ingredients and pressure cook them with the dals. But that makes you lose control on how soft you want the turai pieces.

After 10-15 mins, the turai pieces start to look like below.

As you can see, the flesh is almost about 50% dissolved into the water. You stop boiling now. At this stage, the skin is just about right in crispiness. Now add these boiled contents into the cooked dal. Do not discard any of the boiled water - it contains 50% of the turai flesh !

Tadka:

Usual tadka with 2-3 tsps of Mustard seeds, 2 tsp Jeera seeds, Heeng and Chopped Garlic. Chopped Garlic goes awesome with these types of dals. Make the tadka on medium flame, so as not to burn the garlic. The smell of tadka should be amazing by now.

Add the tadka to the dal. Add some chilli powder if you want it spicy. Adjust salt. Can also add a dash of Garam Masala to the dal if you want to make things really interesting. Just in case, the dal doesnt turn out good, Garam masala also serves to cover up the flaws - I added 1 tsp to this dal. Now the final dal looks like below.

Enjoy with hot rice or chapatis.

Flavors:

I don't want to sound over analytic here. But consider the following

Coconut......southy flavor

Turai..... anywhere flavor

Toor + Moong .... punjabi flavor

Garam masala.... northy flavor

mera bharat mahan...