Dal
Name Variations[]
- दाल — transliterated as dal or daal
- धाल — transliterated as dhal or dhaal (or erroneously written as dahl, daahl, etc.)
About Dal[]
Wikipedia article on dal: Wikipedia
Dal is a term referring to a preparation of legumes (or beans, pulses) that have typically been stewed and cooked after being split and stripped of their outer hulls (for improved digestibility), generally with a variety of savory, sour, sweet, and/or pungent seasonings. The dishes are usually served hot, and the legumes are often pre-soaked in water, before cooking, for further softening and improved ease of hulling.
The term dal is used within many South Asian languages and cooking traditions—with culinary, regional and linguistic variances—, such as the cuisines of Andhra Pradesh, Bangladesh (and West Bengal), Gujarat, Karnataka, Kerala, Nepal, Pakistan, Punjab, Tamil Nadu, and many more. Dal is usually prepared as a soup-, stew-, or porridge-like dish, with assorted spices and aromatics differing by region; in the north of the subcontinent, ingredients such as haldi (turmeric), hing (asafoetida) and jeera (cumin) are utilised, all common mainstays of Indian cuisine, with the addition of savory and warming spices such as garam masala. Dal makhani is one of the most well-known North Indian legume dishes, literally meaning "butter lentils" or "buttered dal", typically cooked with ghee and served with a final pad of butter on the top. Dal everywhere virtually always accompanies an entrée dish, sabzi, and/or rice, in some form, with bread (usually unleavened; chapati, naan, roti, etc) often serving as a "utensil". By contrast, South India's dal counterparts, for example the ubiquitous sambar or rasam, often have thinner broths with chunkier ingredients and incorporate more sweet-and-sour base flavours from ingredients like jaggery, tamarind, tomatoes or kokum, in addition to other fruits and vegetables; South Indian dal also utilises a different spicing scheme, often finishing the dish with a hot oil tempering (tadka) using curry leaves (Murraya koenigii), mustard seed, cumin and haldi/hing.
Hulling pulses improves digestibility and palatability, removing the outer skins of the legumes, at a minimal cost of some nutritional value and fiber content—not unlike that suffered in the milling of whole grains into refined grains, flours, etc.
Kinds of dal[]
- Channa dal / yellow lentils
- Chowli dal
- Kabuli chana / chickpeas, garbanzo beans (with kala/black and hara/green varieties)
- Kulthi dal / horse gram
- Masoor dal / red lentils
- Moong dal / mung beans
- Toovar (toor) dal / pigeon peas
- Urad dal / black lentils
- Val dal / butter beans, field lentils