Hi, Ray here again.
I was looking through the dhal recipes amongst the great range of Curry Focus curry recipes and saw that there was one for Masoor Dal Khicheri. I knew that masoor dal was lentils but admit that I didn’t know what a khicheri was. The ingredients led me to think that it was basically a type of biryani, being a mixture of rice and masoor dal (lentils) cooked with an onion and a few spices.
This is a very cheap meal to make, especially for me because I had everything in the kitchen except for some fresh coriander (cilantro) which I picked up when out for my usual Saturday shop.
I soaked the rice and masoor dal (lentils) an hour before the scheduled cooking start time and prepared the rest of the ingredients after the soaking had been underway for 45 minutes.
And then it was cooking time. This is such a simple recipe to follow and about the only tricky thing was to get the heat really low for the main cooking time of 20 minutes. The khicheri quickly absorbs the water and becomes dry so it is essential that the heat is very low so that the ingredients do not stick and burn.
The dinner guests arrived a few minutes before I served up the food (these were my usual curry tasting couple and I’ve got them pretty well trained to arrive on schedule – if they get there more than a few minutes late then they risk eating cooling food).
I served up the Masoor Dal Khicheri and sprinkled some chopped coriander (cilantro) over the food.
The rice and other ingredients were well cooked. But the khicheri was bland, with a very mild heat/spice rating, and a bit too dry. It was like eating a plateful of rice and vegetables which isn’t necessarily a bad thing but is not what I call a curry dish. As I expected, the khicheri was very like a biryani but it certainly needed one or two chillies, or maybe some chilli powder, to give it a bit of bite. Everyone was in agreement and it received a very average taste score of 6 out of 10.
If you like a very mild curry then this khicheri recipe might be a good curry recipe for you to try but I doubt if I’ll be using this recipe again. Maybe another khicheri recipe might appear on the Curry Focus website which might tempt me.
