Idli are an everyday breakfast food and anytime snack in South Indian cuisine. They're small disks of white fluffy dough, about the size of a person's palm and convex on both sides. The flavor is mild, a little bit tangy like a delicate sourdough bread. They serve a role kind of like bread or tortillas; certainly tasty enough on their own but you'd usually eat them with some kind of topping or dipping thing.
Ideas about breakfast vary widely by culture, and much as I pride myself on being open minded (or open mouthed?) about new flavor combinations and textures, I have the hardest time adjusting to unfamiliar breakfasts. I grew up with normal Polish breakfasts, reassuring staple foods like rye bread with ham, farmer's cheese with scallions, boiled sausages, canned fish paste in tomato sauce, fresh buttered rolls with cherry conserves, scrambled eggs with onions and mushrooms, and so on. Obviously, not all of those things at once. I then slowly expanded my breakfast palette to include American breakfasts like cold milk soups with sweet crunchy corn flakes, hot oatmeal (in Polish cooking, more of a supper food, at least when I was a kid), and the strange but actually quite delicious combination of pancakes with small salty sausages with maple syrup poured over everything including the meat. But when I travel, that first breakfast is the hardest.
This last time when I was in Bengaluru for work, I had idli for breakfast on my second day, and every day thereafter. Idli are very mild, so they are welcome for a jet-lagged stomach. Idli are served with a variety of mostly savory sauces and sides, including sambar, which is warm and tomatoey and spicy, and a cool and cooling and mild coconut chutney. You can pace yourself with the spice as you adjust to South Indian flavor intensity, which has a much higher baseline than I'm used to. I don't even mean spicy as in hot-spicy. There's just a lot more complexity of spices and flavors all the time.
It took some months for me to crave idli again, because, as I said, I had them every day for breakfast for a week. However, idli aren't that widely available as a restaurant food in the US. I found some, but they were just OK. I made some from an instant mix at home and they were pretty good but again not as good as what I had in Bengaluru. So, finally, I decided to make them at home. Let me recount the experiment as it happened.
Idli at home, first attempt #
I have a four day weekend, an instant pot, and all the ingredients ready to go.
Urad dal are a legume. Idli rava is rice ground to the right texture. People who are very dedicated start with rice and grind it at home. I am not that dedicated. First, I need at least six hours to soak the urad dal.
I soaked the urad dal for about eight hours and the idli rava about two hours. I put the soaked urad dal in a blender to grind it, then also added the drained idli rava and some fenugreek and ended up with some nice smelling batter. It may be too watery, but too late to fix that now. Next, it goes in the Instant Pot on the yogurt setting for 12 hours. Maybe I will get idli for breakfast tomorrow? Fingers crossed I did it all right.
I gave the idly batter in the Instant Pot a sniff and after just one hour I can tell it smells right. I really hope I got the texture right!
I don’t have proper idli molds yet but I’ve been using these silicone egg steamers with instant mix so I poured the batter in them.
The idli look OK, less fluffy than I’d like. They taste OK but are too dense and lack the correct tangy flavor. I think the fermentation wasn’t strong enough.
Lessons learned from the first attempt #
I should have watched some videos before I did this but I just went by written instruction. The first thing I decided to change next time was do a full overnight soak for the urad dal and then process them in the powerful food processor instead of the just OK blender. In this video from Gita’s Kitchen, at around 2:30 she shows off a specialized kitchen tool, an electric stone grinder. If this is a normal appliance in an Indian kitchen, it’s no wonder so many recipes blithely say to just use the stone grinder. Aside from being impressed by the stone grinder, I was impressed by how fluffy the dal got as she processed them. This is like the magical process of whipping egg yolks until they are white and fluffy. Until you see it, you think surely this is not something that will happen. Well, it does, it just takes a powerful machine and quite a bit of time.
I got some good advice about doing the float test on urad dal batte to find out if it's fluffy enough. This is basically a home cook's method of determining specific gravity.
This excellent article explained how to grind urad dal using a mixer (aka "mixie") instead of a stone grinder, and how to avoid overheadting the batter when doing so. Because you have to grind the urad dal for a while, the dal can heat up from the friction alone, and definitely from the motor if the motor is right underneath the blades.
Idli at home, second attempt #
This time, I used my powerful Braun food processor to really grind the urad dal. Since the motor is in a side tower there’s less risk of overheating the batter. Still, there is some so I used an instant read thermometer to monitor the temperature along the way. It did get up to 87F (30C) just from the friction.
I forgot to take process photos, but idli, take 2 is now in the fermentation stage.
Idli take 2 went well. I made a larger quantity based on the assumption that fermentation goes better when there’s more mass. The batter had visible bubbles and a light feeling. Once steamed, the idlis had a very mild tanginess and a good crumb. They didn’t rise much in steaming but I think this is now down to using incorrect shapes. I am going to have to get proper idli molds. I used silicone madeline cookie molds to steam some of the idli and those were much better than the big ones I made in the egg poaching cups. They look kind of funny but the madeline shape is about the same thickness as a real idli.
I may have used a little too much liquid in mixing the urad dal. I was worried about the rising temperature. It’s a balance I think I’ll be able to achieve with practice though. Also, initially I didn’t want to get idli stands with molds because it seemed like I could get close enough with egg poaching molds. However, I was wrong. Maybe an experienced cook could intuit the amount to fill to still get a nice rise. Then again an experienced cook might put her foot down and insist that under such conditions we will make a different thing from this batter.
Idli at home, third attempt #
I made so much batter that I was making idli for a week. I finally broke down and bought some used idli molds on Amazon. I tried to find some locally, but I couldn't find any and I felt impatient.
Idli stands have multiple layers of these molds so you can make a whole lot of them at once. Or, you can just steam one or two layers at once if you prefer.
These look a lot more like the real thing.
Even though at this point the batter was in my fridge for five days, the idly still came out very tasty. You can see the crumb in the picture.
Conclusion #
Much as it irks me to admit it, having the right equipment makes a big difference. Similarly, from scratch do taste better than instant. That said, it's hard to make idli just for one. Paul finds idli just OK so I'm left on my own to make and then eat vast quantities. That's not as nice as it sounds. I tried making dosa with the leftover batter, but they came out terrible. You can get excellent dosa in San Francisco, unlike idli, so I'm just going to leave that to the experts. In the future, I may experiment with making a smaller batch or maybe even freezing batter or cooked idli. I don't have a good feeling about those last two options, though, who knows? Perhaps I can just convince people to come over and eat home-made idli. And, I may go back to using the instant mix sometimes when I really want idli and don't have time to plan ahead a day in advance.