Easy and Healthy Dahi Bhalla or Dahi Vada - Holi Special Recipe

Ingredients :

• Urad dal (without skin) : 250gm
• Chopped ginger : 1 tsp
• Chopped green chillies : 1 tsp
• Salt to taste
• Curd : 500gm
• Whole cumin seeds : 4 Tbsp
• Dry whole red chillies : 2
• Sugar : 1 Tbsp 
• Oil to fry

Method :

1. Soak the urad dal overnight in sufficient water.
2. In the morning, wash the dal 2 - 3 times with water.
3. Grind the dal with some salt as per taste in a mixer with minimum amount of water as needed. The paste should be semi solid. It should not contain too much of water so that it flows.
4. Put the ground paste in a large bowl.
5. Add the chopped ginger and green chillies to it.
6. Beat the mixture with a large and heavy spoon.
7. To test if the mixture is beaten appropriately, take a bowl of water. Put a small quantity of the paste into it. If the paste flows on water, the mixture has been beaten properly.
8. If the paste sinks towards the bottom, continue beating the mixture till a small quantity of it starts flowing on water.
9. In a heavy bottomed pan or kadhai, pour some oil to deep fry the vadas and heat it.
10. Take small portions of the mixture and put them in the oil. Deep fry the vadas.
11. Once the vadas are fried till golden, put them in a vessel containing water so that the vadas are submerged in the water.
12. The vadas should be fried only till they are light golden in colour. They should not turn dark in colour.
13. Once the vadas have been fried and soaked in water, take the curd in a large bowl. Add some salt, sugar, water and cumin and red chilli powder mix(see recipe below) as per taste and beat the curd till it is smooth. The curd should be of medium consistency and should not be too thick or thin.
14. Take the vadas out of water one by one and put them into the curd. The vadas should be covered with the curd.
15. Refrigerate it for some time and serve with saunt ki chutney.
16. Delicious dahi bhallas/vadas are ready.

For the cumin and red chilli mix, follow the below steps,

1.  Roast the cumin seeds along with the dry red chillies on a tawa for some time till you are able to smell the aroma of the cumin seeds. Keep the gas on sim, otherwise the spices would burn.
2. Grind the roasted cumin seeds and dry red chillies to a fine powder.

Note : Take care that the vessel easily accommodates all  the vadas and they are submerged in the curd. Do not overcrowd the vessel. Instead, distribute the vadas into two vessels if you do not have a bigger vessel. If you think that all the vadas are not getting submerged in the curd, add some more curd.