A reader requested a recipe for uthappam and this past weekend I decided to do one better: I tried out a healthier version of this already waist-friendly snack. A Brown Rice Uthappam. If you’ve never run into an uthappam before, think of it as a chubby, onion-flecked coconut chutney crossed with an idly. The basic ingredients in all three recipes are the same– rice and udad dal– but the technique makes a world of difference to their final textures and even flavor. While a dosa is spread out into a thin crepe on the griddle using the back of a rounded ladle and an idly is steamed, the batter for an uthappam is poured on much as you would pour on a pancake batter and then left alone. The hot griddle browns the outside and steams the inside and what you end up with is a pancake that has a pleasantly chewy mouth feel. Best of all, you can sprinkle all sorts of veggies and herbs on the uthappam as it’s cooking, the most popular choice being onions and coriander leaves. The veggies sink cozily into the batter and cook up into a deliciously toothy texture. I don’t make uthappam very often because Desi loves his dosas crepey (I even make my Adai – another kind of thick dosa– paper-thin). But the brown rice was definitely an incentive for him because he’s a bigger health nut than I am, and so was the Sundried Tomato Chutney I served up alongside. I also varied the thickness of the uthappams by making a few of them traditionally fat and then spreading a few others more thinly, as you can see in the picture above. Check to get new recipe updates by email.
For my Brown Rice Uthappam I made parboiled brown rice exactly as I did when I created my Brown Rice Dosas. It is a technique that works like a charm and cuts down soaking time by several hours. An Uthappam batter typically contains udad dal, or black gram dal, but I also added a couple of tablespoons of tuvar dal to my recipe although this is not a traditional ingredient. That’s because even as I was soaking the dal I could hear in my head the voice of my sister-in-law Lalitha Manni, a fabulous cook, reminding me that tuvar dal adds crispness to any kind of dosa. So in it went. She was right. My Uthappams had a lovely golden finish and crispy edges that were a delicious complement to the chewy middle.
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