New Recipe Night Food Porn

This is a relatively simple if time consuming recipe for Dal Puri (aka Dal Poori).

Stage one: the lentils! (because there has to be lentils).

Take some split moong dal and soak 'em for two hours. I was running low on moong dal so supplemented with some red lentils. The important thing is to use small lentils.

Then toss the lentils in a pot with some water, a whole clove of garlic and some spices (I used a Jamaican curry powder of cumin, coriander and turmeric, along with salt and chilli flakes).
Then, you cook the hell out of it. You want it to be a thick paste when you're done. Near the end, you'll have to stir almost constantly to keep it from burning.
The end goal is to have a paste thick enough that you can roll it into a ball.
This is why it's best to do this stage well beforehand, so it has time to cool enough to be handled. I did mine the night before.
Some of the online recipes suggested putting the lentils through a food processor, but I suspect that's more useful if you're in a hurry.

Stage two: the bread.

3 cups of flour
3/4 tsp of baking powder
a pinch of salt
a pinch of sugar
probably about a tsp of oil
"some" water.

Sift the flour, salt, sugar and baking powder together.
Add the oil.
Add a bit of water at a time and knead until you have dough.
The dough should be dry, and not sticky. If it is still sticky, go back and knead it until it is.
Make a lump of dough and drizzle with some more oil.
Cover and let sit for 30 minutes.

Knead the dough some more.
Roll the dough out into a big flat thing (shape doesn't matter yet)
Cut the dough up into equal parts. I made four.
Now take each lump of dough, and make it flat and round.
Shape it into a cup.
Make a ball of lentil paste, and drop it in the cup.
Pull the edges of the cup over so that you have a round ball of dough completely encasing the lentils.

Let sit for another 30 minutes.

Roll each ball out into a flat circle. If you do it perfectly, no lentil paste will escape. In practice, just shove it back into the dough and no one will notice.
Fry the suckers in melted butter or earth balance in a big flat pan with a thick bottom. I brushed melted earth balance on mine.
Cook 'em until they brown on the bottom, then do the other side. In theory, there is some visible bubbling, but in practice I just used a flipper to check how the bottom was doing.

i justify this as simple because there are no complex chemical or biological processes going on - I didn't have to bloom yeast, just sift in baking powder.
It's even healthy until you fry it in butter! You could probably dry cook it on a nice griddle or something, but it wouldn't be quite so tasty.