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binsofchaos · 5 years

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A Cook’s Guide to Indian Dal

All dal’d up

Masoor dal

While you sometimes see it with brown hulls still attached, most masoor dal is sold without the hull, revealing a tiny brilliant orange lentil. In the absence of that hull, these tiny legumes more or less dissolve with prolonged cooking, subsuming their essence into a rich, creamy soup. The longer you cook them, the more they disintegrate, and the more buttery body you’ll give your dal. Flavor-wise, masoor dal brings a mild ruddy earthiness to the pot, so you’ll likely want to spice it up with some cumin, chile, and good ghee or olive oil, like in this red dal recipe. Shop masoor dal.

Moong dal

These are skinned and split yellow mung beans, and since they’re small and lack that outer hull like masoor dal, moong dal cooks quickly and tends to dissolve with prolonged cooking. But when cooked for shorter periods of time, it holds its shape a little better than masoor dal, adding a slight feathery texture and mild buttery flavor. Whether you’re cooking moong or masoor dal, one common step is to finish the dish with a tarka: a seasoned oil you drizzle over the dish just before serving. Heat a couple tablespoons of oil or ghee in a pan on medium-high heat along with a pinch of black mustard seeds. When the seeds start to pop, add a pinch of cumin seeds and some fresh sliced green chile, and toss them to coat in the oil. As soon as you smell cumin in the air and the chile skins turn glossy, dump the oil and spices into your pot of dal. Tarkas add a fragrant top note of spice that’s lost with prolonged cooking, and that final teensy bit of oil adds a luxuriousness to the bowl. Shop moong dal.

Mung beans

Here’s where Indian dal starts to get complicated. Mung beans, as they’re usually transliterated, are whole (that is, not split), hull-on legumes, and behave entirely differently from split and skinned moong dal—even though they’re basically the same lentil. While moong dal melts away in the pot, mung beans retain their shape even when cooked to complete softness, so they play well in saucy curries with vegetables or other larger legumes. They also taste a little vegetal and beany compared to buttery moong dal. Beyond simmering for soup, you can soak mung beans overnight, then grind them in a food processor with water, onions, garlic, ginger, and spices to make a thick batter for a savory pancake called pesarattu. It’s similar to a dosa, replacing that dish’s fermented twang with mung beans’ grassy essence. You can also sprout mung beans before cooking to make them more digestible. Shop mung beans.

Toor dal

Also called arhar dal or yellow pigeon peas, toor dal is thicker and rounder than its waifish masoor and moong cousins, so while you don’t need to soak it before cooking, a brief half-hour soak will speed things along. It’s one of the classic dal-as-soup dals along with masoor and moong, though it holds its shape better than either and has a more mealy texture that’s really nice with vegetables like spinach, string beans, tomatoes, and hearty greens. Shop toor dal.

Urad dal

These tiny skinned and split lentils are one half of the magic behind dosas. Dry urad dal is ground into a paste with rice and water, then left to naturally ferment before ladling into a hot buttered pan to cook into a paper-thin pancake. But urad dal also has another use entirely, critical to South Indian cooking. At the start of a bean or vegetable dish, a spoonful of dry urad dal often gets added to hot fat along with mustard seeds and other spices. The lentils toast and darken, adding a subtle nutty vibe to the pot. You might not notice the difference at first, but urad dal is a lot like bay leaves. It harmonizes everything else while bringing the dish’s flavor into focus. Don’t leave home without it. Shop urad dal.

Whole urad dal

Just like mung beans and moong dal, whole urad dal is a different thing all its own. You can also find split versions that still have their black hulls on, but whole urad dal is the most common. Think of it as the black bean of the dal world: distinct in flavor and texture with a dark richness that other legumes lack. (It also has a habit of darkening whatever broth it’s cooked in.) Whole urad dal retains its shape even after hours in the pot, and is the lentil of choice for dal makhani, literally buttered lentils, the cream- and ghee-enriched pride of Punjab. The key to great dal makhani is to cook it slowly over low heat, to ensure the lentils and kidney beans stay intact, and to layer in classic North Indian flavors like onion, garlic, ginger, cumin, and coriander. Oh, and lots of cream and butter. The dish just isn’t makhani without ‘em. Shop whole urad dal.

Chana dal

This is the split and skinned version of the chickpea, and in practice it behaves a lot like yellow and green split peas. You can simmer chana dal into a chunky stew that retains some of its bite, like toor dal, and add it to braised vegetables such as collard greens or kale for extra body and protein. In South Indian kitchens, chana dal often gets used as a seasoning just like urad dal, sometimes together sometimes on its own. The larger legume adds texture as well as toasty flavor, since it doesn’t dissolve completely, and brings a subtly different kind of deep roasted umph to a dish. Toasted chana dal is a great addition to bitter vegetables like broccoli rabe and bitter melon, especially when cut with a squeeze of lemon. Shop chana dal.

Chickpeas

Aka chana and chole, the legume loved around the world. Chana masala, a tomato-inflected spiced chickpea dish, is one of India’s most popular exports. In Punjab, a similar dish goes by the name chole (the Punjabi word for chickpea), and is typically made with roasted spices and without tomato. Chickpeas come in a wide range of sizes, which is handy for customizing in different dishes. If you plan to puree your chickpeas, get the skinned variety; it’ll make for a smoother mash. Shop chickpeas.

Black chickpeas

Also called kala chana or kadala, these are a relative of the common chickpea with a personality all their own. They’re small and dense, with a firm, chewy bite and robust earthiness. You’d never puree these beans; rather, they’re ideal for dishes that need a distinct beany presence and meaty flavor. In the southern state of Kerala, they’re often cooked into kadala curry, a rich sauce of shredded coconut, tomato, onion, and spices, to be served with idli or appam. Since they retain their shape so well, black chickpeas are also a great choice for bean salads and chaat. Shop black chickpeas.

Put your lentils to work

Recipe: Red Lentil Dal

Recipe: Curried Coconut Lentils

Recipe: Khara Huggi

#A Cook’s Guide to Indian Dal #snuk foods #DAL

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goope-jp-tenmei · 7 years

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Gray Vellum Wine Country Wedding Invitations

These invitations combine two of my current favorite paper trends: dreamy vellum and romantic deckled edges! Michelle Castle of Honey Paper designed these gray vellum wine country wedding invitations, with a beautiful vellum overlay on invitations printed on the dreamiest Italian paper with deckled edges. The juxtaposition of crisp vellum and textured paper in this suite is simply stunning. More please!

From Michelle: Guests gathered for an outdoor summer wedding ceremony and reception at The Velvet Bee Vineyard in one of California’s picturesque wine regions. The couple wanted their love and appreciation of the arts to be reflected in every aspect of their wedding day from the hand moulded paper of the invitations to the elegantly handcrafted ceramic dishes.

Texture and nostalgia were integral to the atmosphere. Sheets of white linen the color of cut radish covered the tables and each vase held the velvety, pinnate leaves of silver ragwort, clutches of white zinnia and thick downy roses. Bread and butter plates, saucers and glasses resembling 18th-century creamware enhanced the dreamy ambiance.

We used a combination of hand moulded Italian papers and vellum for the invitation suite and menus emphasizing the polarity of the textures. The dense, fibrous invitation and reply card were printed with a soft gray ink in a font suggestive of a carefully handwritten letter. The invitations were overlaid with wafer thin vellum printed with drawings of garden roses in gray and wrapped in silk ribbon, an orchestration of texture and tone. Creamy white wax seals impressed with a bee stamp finished the invitations. Envelopes were lined with a drawing of a single rose in gray repeating the botanical style of the vellum pieces. Envelopes were addressed in a thin line calligraphic script in gold ink.

A spectrum of gray, cream and white unified the paper details and ceramics – the slow, rich beauty of stone, slate, ash – gray and its association with the passage of time, memory, storms and wisdom. The menu repeated the vellum of the invitation and was printed with a pale, stone gray ink. Focusing on texture and the subtle tone on tone of transition from white to gray was a nod to the beautifully crafted Astier de Villatte ceramics at the table. Menus were placed atop plates with either gilt edges or beaded rims.

The polarity of the clay and glaze, as well as the lightness of the ceramic objects, was something we wanted the stationery and menus to reflect. The lucid, ephemeral quality of the vellum and the feathery edged moulded deckled paper carried those qualities from the invitation suite to the menus.

Thanks Michelle!

Design & Calligraphy: Honey Paper

Paper: Arturo Italian

Honey Paper is a member of the Designer Rolodex – check out more of their beautiful work right here or visit the real invitations gallery for more wedding invitation ideas!

Photo Credits: Cara Robbins Studio

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nofomoartworld · 7 years

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Hyperallergic: K-Pop Conquers the World

I admit it: I’ve come to prefer Korean pop over American pop. The familiar argument, that Korean producers replicate American pop conventions with sly distance and scientific expertise, won’t fly — given the present mediocrity of the American Top 40, what’s to like? Rather, the auteurs behind K-pop have mastered a sort of transhistorical bricolage that stateside comes naturally only to indie bands and the occasional hip-hop beatsmith, turning the planet’s entire history of recorded music into the K-pop producer’s playground — a massive compendium of discrete ingredients available for ransacking, for twisting into concise pop structures. If this is the counterargument to the plagiarism charge, I don’t entirely buy it either, since it could just as easily produce surreal garbage. Maybe it’s just that when a musical cottage industry starts training kids to be pop stars since before adolescence, some of them turn out really talented.

I.U.: Palette (Loen/Fave)

Since going “mature” four years ago on her breakthrough album, Modern Times, I.U. has specialized in several international ballad styles, none of them originally Korean. Assuming an air of dreamy sophistication, the former ingenue has dipped her toes into lounge-jazz, bossa nova, neodisco, Celine Dion facsimile, and any number of styles consistent with notions of cosmopolitan urbanity. Leave it to an aesthete this shrewd to identify each genre’s good parts and isolate them in palatable replicas for her fanbase. The floaty, feathery R&B she offers on this album is typically delightful.

Qualities that would repel in an Anglophone or Francophone singer fascinate in her: her choices in stylistic sources position her as the final link in a chain denoting moments of self-conscious self-differentiation. Slow R&B burners this fluffy, not to mention cocktail ballads this demonstrative, would already qualify as shamelessly retro if Justin Timberlake sang them; I.U.’s translation of this mode into Korean adds an extra layer of distance, such that the music turns obsessively self-reflexive, containing mirror upon mirror. Awareness of form ensures a willingness to stretch formal boundaries, and this album uses blank space to such masterful effect that each song blurs the traditional distinction between ballads and dance tracks. Piano, strings, quietly subtle rhythm guitar, and cannily minimal drum machine create thin, restrained, readymade shapes. While she sings straightforwardly around the melody in the foreground, her breathy backup vocals — or strings, or a softly ostinato keyboard texture — fill in the empty spots between the lines drawn by the discrete instruments, tricking the listener into imagining vast expanses of space. Paradoxically, the effect is intimate; the songs and their singer have room to breathe, especially on “Love Alone,” the album’s centerpiece — a slow, haunting, excruciating ballad extraordinaire. Swaying with stark power while stealing from Brazil the concept of saudade, the song’s gentle, plucked acoustic guitar harmonics accentuate a melody inextricable from the rawness of her voice. Nine more songs in this vein produce an album of exquisite delicacy.

Thrilling in its reticence, Palette is primarily a triumph of arrangement, of instruments positioned next to each other in complimentary proportions. Hence, you can feel the ache in I.U.’s singing. Play it at night over headphones and gasp at her every whisper.

Day6: Sunrise (JYP Entertainment)

Each release by this guitar-toting gang has leaned a tad more heavily toward arena rock, and their full-length debut is where they turn on their distortion pedals and crunch up a storm. Pounding energetically as they do, there’s nevertheless a dull predictability to this move that makes me wish they’d lighten up again.

As their eye shadow and punchy, theatrical dynamics would indicate, they draw as much influence from mid-’00s American emo bands as from late ‘00’s Korean indie-rock, but their strengths are inversely proportional to those of most emo bands. Theoretically I’m not sure whether Dashboard Confessional is a band anybody should emulate. As with those avatars of bathetic yearning, Day6’s ballads, so huge and soaring and plaintive, are kitsch masterpieces — the magnificent “I Smile,” its solemn, arpeggiated guitar chime ringing out through the air, flaunts heartbreak the way a jock might bare a set of washboard abs. Their upbeat songs, however, land with a joyless thud, beholden to excessive notions about how hard the drums must hit and how gritty the guitars must sound. If the mix were crisp rather than merely polished, the guitars might crack sharply and provide serviceable contrast with the songwriting’s earnest sensitivity, but instead the band bulldozes the material into a blunt thrash. Comparison with Daydream, last year’s sublime mini-album, reveals much; when their power pop was still agile on its feet, their amusement at getting to act like heartthrobs shone through. Here the distorted whomp obscures such frivolities. The difference is slight but exhausting.

Many of their hooks remain fetching — ”I Wish,” “I’m Serious” (what a title!) — but taken together they equal an album overwhelmed by hasty rock loudness. Barring a resurgence in rhythmic spring, I hope they shift their focus to ballads exclusively. Adducing a bleeding heart may just inspire emotions extreme enough to satisfy.

Ignito: Gaia (Mnet)

I’m skeptical of foreign language rap — each language’s cadence clicks with a different set of rhythms, and not always those specified by received Anglophone convention. Thankfully, Ignito concedes nothing to such expectations, and the Korean rapper’s second album delivers sensationalist energy while realizing the language’s sonic potential for rapid-fire delivery.

Musically, this album turns being loud and obnoxious into a battle cry. Producer Kontrix’s beats — which combine synthesized strings, power chords, sinister showoff lead guitar, giant slabs of slammed electronic boom, and, on “Metal Rising,” a massed choir — recall prior hip-hop accompaniment less than they do Kavinsky, the Star Wars soundtrack (prequels only) interpreted for synthesizer, and any music imbued with the sort of grandiosity whereby a hero has only four minutes to save the world. This is maximalist orchestral technocratic schlock of the highest order, conjuring a mock sense of shock at its own presence — “oh no, it’s me!,” cry the electronic violins and the blues guitar. The bullheaded arrogance necessary for a rapper to choose this as his musical setting astounds, and Ignito delivers. He’s got the voice for it: deep, aggressive, froglike, inhabiting a defiantly angry yet infuriatingly self-assured tone that matches the orchestration exactly. Lacking sufficient knowledge of Korean rap to place him in context, I’ll compare him instead to Kevin Gates; both convey the sense that their tongues are too big for their mouths, so they can only blubber their lips. But Ignito’s flow is quicker and more multifaceted, more mindful of internal rhymes, more willing to stretch a line and break the meter. Treating macho puffery as a kinetic skill, the album plays like a pushy show of technique. He’s got the eye of the tiger, and you’re gonna hear him roar.

No clue what the lyrics are saying beyond an English chorus or two, and I’m not sure I want to — given his manner on the microphone, he might be an unpleasant character up close. I’m grateful to the language gap for rendering delectable such a vivid portrait of gruff masculinity in the abstract.

Lovelyz: R U Ready? (Woolim/CJ E&M)

Whatever the virtues of sugary soda and tacky plastic product, a reasonable consumer could wonder just how many girly electropop albums one needs. The answer is a zillion, obviously. This Korean girl group’s second album, as tangible as Silly Putty, terrifically demonstrates why.

So cheerful one might consider them a parody of pep, PC Music’s fantasy of what the perfect K-pop band would sound like, Lovelyz inhabit a childish cuteness that, contrary to expectations, isn’t common in K-pop proper — even the danciest stars typically court the adult contemporary market as well. With song titles like “My Little Lover,” a singer (one of eight) named “Baby Soul,” and a musical style whose cartoon simplicity codes as pre-erotic, Lovelyz instead pursue the diminutive. The album thrills in its one-dimensionality. Fizzy bright synthesizers squeak, whirr, and pop like balloons pop; synthetic slapped funk bass bounces like a rubber ball; hyped-up drum machines get the party going; breathless vocals project utter delight at the fact of their presence in such a playful environment. Imagine a digital electronic template as sweet and clean as Britney Spears’s, with the mood altered from flirty ambiguity to the joy a child feels upon seeing a pile of birthday presents, each shinier than the next, wrapped in glossy paper and tied with a bow. I’ll extend the metaphor: the singers, ebullient as they are, represent the kid. The spritzy beats, and by extension the whole album, represent the most fabulous gift one could have hoped for. What a treat to witness such joy.

This album ticks off so many of my taste boxes — sleekly stylized product, formalized genre exercise, crafty simulations of emotional structure, sonic textures you can taste and feel — that it inspires the sneaking suspicion that these elements all belong to one mode. They don’t necessarily, though. The album’s just perfect, that’s all.

The post K-Pop Conquers the World appeared first on Hyperallergic.

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