Recipes That Keep On Giving: Fusion Dahl

Fusion cooking, a blending of two culturally diverse cuisines, was an early noughties fad. Like many fads, the concept was good, the execution problematic, and the adoption by plebs too high to sustain lasting chic. See leggings, chai, flares and boho anything.

However, when fusion works, you find yourself in a land of culinary world peace, ebony and ivory living in perfect harmony on your plate. Or, in the case of the recipe I’m about to share with you, Anglo stodge and Indian spice combining in one of the best, cheapest and easiest dinners going.

The quickest way to take you on this journey is to get you to do the following. Imagine a full English breakfast. Imagine a bowl of dahl. Imagine if we merged the two. What would you get? East meets West. Stodge meets Spice. Fusion dahl.

The basic concept of replacing the beans component of a full English breakfast with lentil dahl was one that A Bite To Eat, a Canberra institution, trialled a number of years ago. (A full English, for the uninitiated, consists of bacon, sausage, egg, beans, toast, and some sort of fried vegetable, usually tomato, mushroom, or spinach, or all three. In my opinion, a full English is not a patch on a full Scottish, the latter being superior on account of the sheer amount and type of sausage on offer, but let’s leave that simmering ethnic tension for another post). On an evening when I was at the buy-the-two-cents-a-tin-cheaper-tin-of-tomatoes end of a pay cycle, I decided to turn my favourite poor-girl supper of red lentil dahl into an experimental cross cultural peasent feast, by adding crispy bacon, sausage, egg and toast. And that’s when I blew my mind.

Something about the combination of salty spicy dahl, salty meaty bacon and sausage, gooey egg, crisp toast, and sweet butter speaks of the best of multiple culinary worlds. Indeed, it was the dish I cooked, in a fit of Rule (Modern, Multicultural) Britannia, to eat whilst watching the royal wedding earlier this year. It has been on high rotation ever since.

Last night, I played with the formula some more. Conscious of the looming Christmas meatfest (and sugar fest, and grog fest, and general fest fest), I decided to replace the sausages with green veg, the toast with mashed home grown parsnips from PapaK’s garden, and loose the egg altogether. The result was incredible, all the more so for being a virtuous cousin to the nutritionally cheeky salt and carb overload of the original.

Recipes for the cheeky and the virtuous are supplied below. Pick according to need.

Cheeky Fusion Dahl

Serves 2 hungry people

1 cup red lentils, soaked in hot water
Butter, oil, for frying
3 cloves crushed garlic
2cm knob ginger, grated
Teaspoon garam marsala
Teaspoon tumeric
1 teaspoon massell vegetable stock powder
1 teaspoon massell chicken stock power
Hot water
6 Rashes bacon, rind trimmed
6 sausages
4 slices toast
2 eggs

Heat oil and butter in a medium saucepan until butter is frothy. Fry garlic and ginger, with a pinch of salt, until softened. Add spices, stir till aromatic. Drain lentils and add to pan, turning down heat to prevent catching. Sprinkle over stock powder, cover with hot water, and simmer over low heat until lentils are tender and dahl is at a dahl like consistency (if I were Nigella, I’d ladle in a couple of innuendos here, but I’m not, so I’ll go tautological instead).

While dahl is simmering, cook bacon and sausages until crispy, keep warm on a plate in the oven. Fry eggs in bacon and sausage pan, at the same time toast your toast until toasted (tautology, again!).

Assemble as you see fit. My preference is: toast, buttered, topped with steaming mound of dahl, topped with runny-yolked fried egg, sausage to the side, bacon balanced delicately on top. And a sprig of coriander, for a token bow to greenery.

Virtuous fusion dahl

One quantity of dahl, as above
Good handful of parsnips, peeled, chopped roughly
Butter, pepper, salt
Green vegetables for two (I like kale and French beans)
4 rashers bacon

Make dahl as above, but place parsnips in a pot with water and set over high heat as soon as you start the dahl. Cook parsnips until tender. Drain, add a knob of butter to the pan, along with salt and pepper to taste, and mash until smooth. This improves if allowed to sit for five minutes. Cook bacon, as above, and toss your greens off in the bacon fat immediately before serving.

Again, preferences for assemblage vary, but I like a mountain of parsnip, foothills of greens, a volcanic flow of dahl on top and some precariously balanced bacon.

Of course, you could veganise this concept, if that’s your thing, by replacing the egg, bacon and sausage component with crispy fried tofu cubes, avocado, or oven baked mushrooms. Vegetarians can substitute haloumi for the bacon, or jut throw on some extra eggs. Whatever you do, it’ll be a brilliant, spicy, stodgy harmony.