How to make Idli / Dosa batter at home?

Soft, puffy and tasty Idlis and crispy dosas form the most important and yummy South Indian breakfast recipe.

Making Idli/ Dosa batter at home used to be very common. But in our hectic day to day life we have ended up adapting the ready-to-use batter. But if you are ready to give less than 30 mins of your time on a weekend you can make super tasty and healthy batter at home. Being in IT industry I have also been using the ready-to-use idly/ dosa mix. Then I decided to give it a try to make it at home and the results were very positive. Here are the steps to follow.

Ingredients:

Dosa rice - 2 cups
Avil (Avlakki) (Rice flakes) - handful
Urad Dal (Uzhunnu) (Black gram - peeled off) - 1/2 cup
Methi seeds (Vendayam) (Fenugreek seeds) - 1 spoon
Salt

Dosa Rice to Urad Dal ratio is 1:4

Preparation:

Soak dosa rice and rice flakes together in a bowl of water for 2 hours.
Soak Urad dal and Methi seeds together in another bowl of water for 2 hours.
After 2 hours of soaking, transfer the dosa rice and rice flake mixture to a mixer grinder.
Drain out the excess water and store it in a vessel. This water can be used while grinding.
Grind the mixture well in the mixer grinder. Use the water which was used for soaking while grinding the mixture. The mix should be ground throughly to become very fine and soft.
Transfer the mix to a big vessel.
As done in the above step, drain out the excess water from Urad Dal-Methi seed mix to a vessel.
Transfer Urad Dal-Methi seeds it to the mixer grinder and grind it well to make a soft mix.
After grinding, transfer the mix to the dosa mix in the big vessel.
Mix all the ingredients thoroughly. Add the water which was used for soaking slowly and carefully and continue mixing. The batter should be thick and not watery. Close it with a lid.
We need a big vessel to store this mix because overnight it is going to ferment and if you chose a small vessel the batter will overflow.
Do not keep the batter in the fridge now. Let it remain in the closed vessel.
The next day you can see that the dosa batter has fermented and hence the volume has increased.
Mix the batter one more time thoroughly and also add 2 spoons of salt while mixing.
On day 1, you can make idlis with this batter.
From here on you can keep the batter in refrigerator and you can use it for dosas or idlis.
The batter will be good for dosas from day 2.
Kept in refrigerator, you can use this batter for a week.

PS: In case the weather is cold , the batter will not get fermented overnight. This problem happens in cities like Bangalore. You can try a trick here.

Wrap the vessel using 2 layers of newspaper and keep it overnight. Sometimes it will get fermented overnight or else let it remain in the wrap for one more day. So on day 1 night if you are making the batter and wrapping it, on day 2 evening it will be ready to use. Hereafter you can store it in fridge.

Do try out this one and let me know if it worked for you.

Dosa Rice