LIVE TO COOK

Pesaraatu is a recipe from Andra Pradesh, a State in South India. My friends have written about it a lot, earlier. Each one of them is unique by itself. I am writing about my way of preparing it in this post.

I love recipes with sprouts. I always sprout the legumes for the recipes that uses one. And pesarattu falls in that category. For this recipe, some use Mung dhal…but, I prefer Whole mung beans.

The Ingredients are:

1 Cup Whole Mung beans
1/4 Cup Raw Rice
2 – 3 Green chilli
1 Tablespoon shredded Fresh ginger.
1 Tablespoon chopped Cilantro
1 Teaspoon Salt
5-6 Curry leaves, chopped
1/8 Cup oil
1 Pinch Asafetida
1 Cup of chopped onion for topping

Here’s what I did:

Sprouting the beans:

Washed and soaked the mung beans in 3 cups water for more than 12 hours. Drained in a colander. Kept a plate below the colander and covered the colander with a damp cheese cloth. Washed and drained the beans twice during the sprouting period. The beans sprouted in 12 hours. The sprouts looked like this:

Kept the sprouts in refrigerator until the rice was ready. Washed and soaked the rice for 2 hours.

Preparing the Batter:

Drained the water completely and put the rice and mung sprouts in a blender, Added ginger and green chillies to it. Ground them in to a fine paste using 1/4 cup of water. Mixed the salt, asafetida, cilantro and curry leaves to the batter.

I Let the batter to sit for 6 hours. Sprouting and fermenting of dried beans help in ailing digestion. So it is my practice to ferment the batter for 6 hours.

Preparing the pesarattu:

Heated the griddle till a drop of water on the griddle evaporates within a second. Poured 1/2 cup of batter in the center of the griddle and spread the batter in to a circle of 6 inch diameter with the back of a spoon or cup, poured 1/2 teaspoon of oil to the circumference of pesarattu. when the sides turned golden brown, flipped and cooked on the other side too.

In a separate pan, heated 2 teaspoons of oil and fried the onions till golden brown. Turned off the heat. Sprinkled 2 Tablespoons of browned onions on top of pesarattu and served with tomato thokku (Tomato Pickle).

This is my another entry for Lakshmi’s “Celebrating Regional Cuisines of India” event , hosted by Latha. Please find more information here…