This is a fried snack my mom prefers to do for festivals, to pack for my brothers and for me when we leave to our hostels (during college days) and when we go on a long journey in holidays. Also great for an evening snacks. This is my modified version of the recipe whereas my mom soaks and grinds rice freshly in a wet grinder and add dall powder to it.
Ingredients:
Rice flour- 4 cups
Fried gram dall flour/ chutney dall flour – 1 cup
Gram dall- 1 cup
Butter- 2 tbsp (or) Heated and cooled canola oil- 2 tbsp
Dry chillies- 8 no
Garlic – 10 pods
Asfoetida- 1/4 tsp
Cumin seeds- 1 tsp (optional)
Sesame seeds- 1tsp (optional)
Salt – 2 tsp
Oil – sufficient to deep fry
Method:
Soak the gram dall in water for 1/2 hour.
Grind the dry chillies first in a blender. Add peeled garlic pods next and fried gram dall atlast. Measure this flour and for 1 cup of this flour add 4 cups of rice flour. Take them in a large bowl, add salt, asfoetida, cumin seeds, sesame seeds and drained chana/gram dall. Mix the dry ingredients with the butter without any crumbles, and add water slowly . Mix till you can make a ball out of it. The dough will be like chapathi dough except for the elasticity.
Heat the oil in a wide bottom kadai so you get the maximum surface area to do large batches of frying. Also ensure you heat good amount of oil .Whne you take smaller quantity, the oil gets heated up easily and regulating the temperature will be a tedious job by itself.
Back home, my mom gets help from her house maids when one fries and others do the pressing. They spread a Dhoti (veshti) on the floor and take a small ball of the dough and press it on the dhoti by greased hands to get a thin round disc. When a batch is ready , it is fried in oil, on the both sides, till it turns golden yellow color. They are then drained and cooled before packing in air tight containers.
Here in USA, I am a single woman army, so, I go for smaller batches of frying. I have no enough floor space in the kitchen and moreover my kids have no patience in seeing me work on the floor. So, I cut the edges of a few ziploc bags and pressed the dough in between the sheets. Since you do it like a sandwich, the thattais do not dry that fast and you need no oil for your hands.
Don’t miss my fellow bloggers’ version of thattai: