Wheat Flour Pancakes
One of the quickest and easy dosas to make is the tasty, light and lacy Godumai dosai. Although not popular with my children, I would resort to making Godumai dosai when I ran out of ideas. Menu planning was never easy with three children with different tastes. It needed to appeal to their taste buds, and yet be nutritious. On then occasions when I made this dosai, I had to resort to cajoling, or using distracting techniques like telling stories, and sometimes even being very stern to make them eat. Sometimes, by the time the three kids ate, I would really feel enough is enough!
I don’t recollect how, but I started the practice of making dosais shaped like flowers, stars and so on, after which they would readily eat up these dosais, with a little sugar or curd. I still remember the kids sitting in a row in the kitchen and demanding dosais shaped like a house, rabbit, bird, lion and so on! I would be a sport and try to fling the thin godumai dosai batter into these shapes. Children are anyway very imaginative. They would happily see these shapes, in the odd shaped dosais I made!
Ingredients
Wheat Flour - 1 cup
Water - 4 cups
Salt - to taste
Chopped corriander - 1 Tbsp
Curry leaves - a few
Jeera (Cumin seeds) - 1/2 teaspoon
Asafoetida - a pinch
Ghee / Oil - 1 tsp per dosa
Optional:
Grated ginger - 1/4 tsp
Grated coconut - 1 Tbsp
Finely chopped onion - 1 Tbsp
Method
1) Make a batter of thin consistency by mixing all the ingredients. The consistency should easily pour-able. Regular pancake or dosai batter consistency is too thick for this dosai. This should be watery enough, such that a ladle poured on the tava (pan) quickly spreads out on its own.
2) Heat a tava or pan. A non-stick pan is the easiest to use. Wipe a bit of oil or gree on the pan, using a halved onion. This helps spread the oil evenly all over the pan.
3). Stir the batter so that it is well mixed. Take a ladle-full and pour into the tava. If the consistency is right, the batter will spread out on its own, or you can swish the nonstick pan to help spread it.
4) Air bubbles will rise and break giving a porous appearance to the dosai.
5) Turn down the flame to sim. You can add a little ghee around the dosai and inside a few of the pores.
6) There is no need to turn over the dosai to cook it. Leave it untouched, until the bottom becomes reddish brown and crisp, and the Godumai dosai easily slides off the pan onto a plate!
You can serve this with a variety of chutneys. However I relish this with the adee rasam or the thick part of rasam!
