I’ve been making a lot of recipes from Richa Hingle‘s cookbook lately, which include a lot of traditional recipes and also creative vegan creations of her own.
Recently, I decided to try making two of her recipes for a delicious Sunday morning Indian breakfast!
The first recipe is an Indian savory pancake, called Chilla Pancakes, and made with besan, or chickpea flour. If you’re new to chickpea flour but have baked before, you might have passed by it in the baking aisle, also under “garbanzo flour.”
Besan is a version of chickpea flour that is even more densely packed and fine. It makes for really delicious, protein-rich, and savory pancakes, and the flour is much finer than regular chickpea flour that is made in the states. There are a good amount of Indian grocery stores nearby, so I was able to find besan for this recipe.
The recipe comes together quickly, and it begins with mixing chickpea flour with water, and then adding spices, onion, and chiles – I used jalapeños.
After that, you pour a 1/4 and 1/3 ladle of the batter into a skillet and move the batter around, and pour some oil on the sides of the pancake as well.
After that, you just cook until it’s golden brown, and there are bubbles glimmering under the pancake. These pancakes are simply delicious, and are delicious with Sriracha, chili oil, or a little bit of ketchup. Those are probably not traditional Indian toppings, but that’s my Chinese Americanness coming out.
I made a whole stack of these and could barely stop myself from gobbling it up! Absolutely delicious. But the pancakes did make me thirsty, so I thought, why stop there?
Richa also has a special vegan non-dairy chai recipe. The recipe does require a grinder and lots of spices to be grounded up, but then it creates a powder that you can use for chai again and again.
Of course you’ll also need loose leaf chai or tea bags. I just had tea bags so I cut them open and measured them.
Altogether, you need water, sugar, Chai tea, (Richa recommends the Jivraj brand,) chai powder, grated ginger, and almond milk or coconut milk. To make the chai powder, you combine green cardamom pods, cinnamon sticks, cloves, peppercorns, ginger, and fennel seeds. I didn’t have fennel with me at the time, so I left it out.
You put the tea leaves and all the powder together and cook it with the almond milk. Altogether, the tea takes about 20 minutes to make. After that, you strain it through a colander into your glass.
Just like all chai, it’s delicious both hot and iced. In the end, the tea I made wasn’t as creamy as the kind I’ve had in my Indian restaurants, but it was still a great addition to my breakfast.
If this looks good, I definitely recommend checking out Vegan Richa‘s cookbook. For a while, I skipped over the breakfast section since I was mostly interested in entrees for lunch and dinner. But now I’ve gone through so many recipes that I’ve just ordered her other vegan cookbook in my next recipes haul. Can’t wait to try more of her recipes soon!
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