A Love Letter to Dal

A weeknight workhorse

Pre-order my debut cookbook, Pakistan: Recipes and Stories from Home Kitchens, Restaurants and Roadside Stands. Featuring 100+ delicious recipes, stunning photography and essays that ground the food in place and context, "Pakistan" is the most complete look at Pakistani cuisine to date!

The past two weeks have been horrifying. Following the unauthorized dismantling of USAID, and suspension of nearly all foreign aid contracts and cooperative agreements, all my friends and former colleagues in Washington DC have lost their job. My friends who are posted with USAID abroad are stranded, not knowing if and when they will get sent back to the US. While these impacts are deeply personal, the effects extend far beyond Washington DC. See Declan Walsh’s latest piece on its impacts on Africa. Lifesaving humanitarian assistance is put on hold, and with the United States being the largest provider of foreign assistance, we are looking at nearly 100, 000+ jobs lost globally.

It's been difficult to keep our head above water with the current news cycle but it’s also important to not turn away. I appreciated Ezra Klein’s recent op-ed, Don’t Believe Him. That’s the energy I’m doing my best to step into what is going to be a terrifying four years.

Going Paid

While publicly, my focus has been on food for the past three years, the bulk of my income came from technical writing for international development clients. The death of my industry has cemented my pivot to food media. With this post, I’m officially opening up paid subscriptions. I have been shy about going paid because I wasn’t sure what my Substack “model” was going to look like. I don’t think I can produce recipes on a weekly basis but I’ll experiment with what I can offer, and what resonates with you all. If you follow my work, and find what I’m doing valuable, please consider subscribing for as little as $5 per month, and let me know what you would like in your inbox! Right now, I’m considering a mix of recipes, menu ideas and city recommendations but am open to ideas!

If you are unable to subscribe but still want to support, please spread the news about my upcoming cookbook, Pakistan, and if you have tried recipes from the blog and liked them, leave a starred ranking to help boost Pakistan Eats’s search rankings.

So, What About Dal?

I promise this is not a cliched “dal is love” post. Or maybe it is? I do think that dal gets far too much air time on social media but I started thinking about it again after my recent interview with Liza who writes for the fantastic newsletter Cool Beans, which focuses on sustainable, plant-based diets. In response to her question about what plant-based things I’m into, I told her that I have dal 2 to 3 times a week but still manage to keep it fresh.

This however, was not always the case.

Like every other desi student that moves away from home, dal was the first dish I learned to cook. My mother taught me how to make a basic masoor ki dal (red lentils) over the phone, spiced with nothing but salt, turmeric and red chili powder, and topped with a simple tadka of onions fried in oil. Since I was not the type of kid who would hang in the kitchen and walk my mother cook, I never learned about the ‘ghotna’ process, in which you mash the dal while it cooks to give it a thick, creamy consistency. As a result, my dal, for many years was really bad. But as a broke entry-level non-profit professional, I continued to have it on repeat, and ultimately, grew to hate it.

My breakthrough moment happened when (1) I finally learned the ghotna process thanks to Sameen Rushdie’s fabulous cookbook Indian Cookery (she has also incidentally provided a very kind blurb for my book); and (2) began to make kaali dal, which I learned from a family friend’s cook. I recently updated the recipe for this kaali or whole masoor dal on the blog. Now, I rotate between multiple types of dal.

In the cookbook, Pakistan, I have included recipes of two of my favorites: khatti moong dal – tamarind-infused yellow lentils – and roadside style mash ki dal, a punchy, yellow-hued urad dal dressed with lots of cilantro. But here are all the types of dal I have in my pantry:

· Masoor dal (red lentils): This is a very popular variety of dal (available in major US grocery stores as well) because of how quickly it cooks. Recipe

· Moong dal (yellow lentils): These are husked and halved mung beans, which in their whole form are green. Recipe

o My aunt, Mariam, has a great recipe for a mixed moon and masoor dal, which is up on the blog. It’s one of my favorites, and definitely worth a try. Recipe

· Whole masoor dal (brown lentils): Although we call it kaali dal (black lentils), these are more brown in color. Different from the actually black sabut urad dal. Recipe.

· Urad dal (split black gram dal): The whole version of urad dal is black. While there ways to prepare the whole variety, I use the split version to make either the roadside mash ki dal in the cookbook, or a mildly spiced version I learned from my mother. This is a dry dal and best enjoyed with roti or naan rather than rice. Recipe

· Chana dal (Bengal gram dal): A firm dal, in my house, we rarely had it by itself. We typically mixed it in with mutton for dal gosht or incorporated it in haleem or shami kebab (pan-fried beef kebabs) to thicken the consistency. You can however, cook it by itself as well. Like urad dal, it’s also a dry dal that’s best enjoyed with roti or naan. Recipe

This is of course, not an exhaustive list of lentils – just the ones in my pantry! I hope they will give you the nudge you need to step up your dal game but it doesn’t end here.

Don’t Skip the Tadka

You can drastically impact the flavor of the dal by topping it with tadka or ‘tempered spices.’ Each of the dal on the blog have a different tadka, ranging from basic (fried onions) to more complex (a mix of garlic, onion, dried red chiles and cumin seeds). I like all types of tadka, and would encourage you to apply any variation to your dal.

A Quick Note About Instant Pot

I was an Instant Pot skeptic for a long time until I started using it to make dal. Absolute game changer. It may seem like extra work but the consistency is so good, it’s absolutely worth it.

Other News

Press: Check out my interview about the book in Forbes!

Cooking: We have been having Melissa Clark’s roasted chicken thighs with garlicky cucumber yogurt on repeat.

Reading: An old but wonderful piece on Storytellers Street in Peshawar by journalist, Manzoor Ali.

Listening to: This Arab Funk playlist. Thanks Spotify.

Watching: Mo, like everybody else!