How To Make Varan (Indian Daal)

Hi, welcome to ShowMeTheCurry.com. I'm Hithel, I'm Anuja and today we're going to show you how to make a Maharashtrian style daal called varan. I notice you have a pressure cooker here, the pressure cooker is a really important utensil that you can invest in for your kitchen. It will cut your cooking time in half, if not more. For any daals, like a toor daal, or dry beans, or lentil of any type, you're going to need something like this otherwise you're going to spend the whole day in the kitchen, and I know you don't want to do that. So, Anuja, should we get started?


You're going to need these ingredients: 1 cup toor daal. 3 cups water. 1 teaspoon finely grated ginger. 1/4 teaspoon methi seeds, or fenugreek seeds. 1 to 2 green chillis, slit lengthwise. 1/2 medium onion, finely diced. 1/2 teaspoon salt, or to your taste. 1/2 teaspoon lime juice, or to your taste. 5 sprigs of cilantro, chopped for garnishing. For seasoning, you will need: 4 teaspoons cooking oil. 1/2 teaspoon jeera (cumin). 1/4 teaspoon haldi (tumeric). 1 pinch of hing (asofoetida. )1 sprig curry leaves. 5 large cloves of garlic, roughly smashed1 medium tomato, diced.

We're going to start off by washing 1 cup of toor daal. You're going to wash it until the water runs clear. Do you know why there are some daals which have oil on them, some toor daals which have oil, and some are plain? Ever wonder? Well, a while back, especially in India, they used to coat these seeds or daal with castor oil, and that would prevent fungus and bugs from getting into the daal. But I think these days we don't have those problems, so I would stick to buying plain toor daal that does not have any oil on it.

So let's open our pressure cooker, and we're going to add our ingredients in. Here is our washed toor daal. Add in your onions, your water, ginger, green chillis, and your methi seeds.

Now if you decide to save a lot of time, or you want to save a lot of time, which we all do, you should probably soak your toor daal for at least about 15 to 20 minutes, but since we're showing you how to do this right now and we didn't soak it, we're going to go ahead and cook this a little bit longer, for about 8 to 10 whistles. And go ahead and close this.


OK, so while our toor daal is cooking, we're going to start with the rest of our process. We're going to work on the seasoning. We call it vagay, however some call it tarkar.


And I think we will need a medium sauce pan for this. If you use a non-stick pan, it's a lot healthier cooking because you tend to use a lot less oil with non-stick material. You're going to put 4 teaspoons of oil, you're going to heat it in this pan. Make sure your oil is hot before you put in the rest of your ingredients and you can usually test this by putting a couple of jeera seeds in there and if they start moving around like that, it's ready. So you can go ahead and put the jeera in. Let them sizzle around there for a few seconds.

All right, you can add some haldi in there now, hing, and your curry leaves. You can kind of pinch them off that stem there. OK, your garlic and stir that around a little bit. You want to cook your garlic until it gets a little brown, but be sure you don't burn it because it turns really bitter. OK, that garlic looks brown enough. I think you can add the tomatoes in there right now. You want to cook this for about a minute. Wow, that looks great. There's nothing like fresh tomatoes. That looks just about done. You can go ahead and turn off the gas now, and we'll wait for our daal to finish cooking.

I think this toor daal is just about done. Make sure the pressure is gone before you open the lid. OK, we're going to pour it in here. Be careful. Go ahead and give that a good stir. OK, you can go ahead and add the salt and lime juice in now. And also if this consistency is a little too thick for you, you can also add water in right now.

And there you have it, Anuja! We j