Sambar - Toor Dal with mixed Vegetables

Create a slightly sour South-Indian dish that will delight your palates and those of your guests!

How to make Sambar

First of all you place the tamarind into a bowl and soak it in two cups water. They will have to soak for approximately 20 minutes. In the meantime you can start washing the vegetables. Cut off the ends of the bottle gourd and cut them in medium-sized pieces. Cut the pumpkins and the eggplant into medium pieces as well and the beans in pieces of about 2 centimeters length.

Heat up half a teaspoon of olive oil in a big pot and when it is hot, roast the lentils in it until they have changed their colour to a golden shine. At this point you add the vegetables into the pot. Pour the remaining six cups of water into the pot and stir. Add the ginger and the turmeric as well as the salt. If you like your food a bit more spicy, you can add more ginger. Stir and put the lid onto the pot in which you will let the vegetables get cooked on medium heat for the next 25 minutes. You just stir from time to time.

The tamarind have probably soaked for 20 minutes already now and you can now put your hand into the tamarind water and rub a bit on the tamarind to open the fruit, which will now be slightly soft, and let the sour flesh spread a bit more of its flavor to the water. The seeds may come out of the fruit in the process of doing this. Now take a sieve and filter out all the bigger pieces like the seeds and skin. You can press the tamarind flesh a bit to get out all the water and catch the water in a bowl.

Check now whether your vegetables are soft already. If they aren’t, just let them cook more until they are. Then you take a pan and heat up the remaining two tablespoons of olive oil in it. When it is hot, add the cumin, the mustard seeds and in the end the fresh curry leaves. Stir until the curry leaves are crispy. Now add this spice mixture into the vegetables.

Some spices will now go on top of this: you add the Garam Masala, the ginger powder and the coriander. Grind the fenugreek seeds and add the powder and dissolve the asafetida in two teaspoons of water before you add this, too.

In the end you finally add the water of the tamarind. Bring the mixture to a boil and let it cook for about ten minutes. Now you are done, after a long preparation, and have a tasty Sambar in front of you!