kindkit | rice with yogurt and mustard seeds

I cooked this tonight, inspired in part by a discussion about rice dishes on

executrix's journal, and since it turned out to be absolutely fantastic, I thought I'd share.

This is another recipe from Raghavan Iyer's 660 Curries, from which I've loved pretty much every recipe I've tried. This one's fairly simple, though it does require a couple of ingredients that may, depending on where you live, be tricky to find.

1 cup white basmati rice
2 cups unsweetened plain yogurt
1 1/2 teaspoons salt (I used less, as I always do these days)
2 tablespoons canola oil
1 teaspoon black mustard seeds
1 tablespoon urad dal (= skinned split Indian black lentils)
2 tablespoons chopped cilantro (aka fresh coriander)
12 to 15 curry leaves
3 to 5 fresh green chiles of your choice, sliced (I used two serranos, as the chiles available here tend to be both large and fairly hot)

Wash the rice thoroughly in several changes of water, rubbing it gently between your fingers each time, until the water remains fairly clear. Drain, then add 1 1/2 cups of fresh water and soak at room temperature for 20-30 minutes.

Bring the pan to a boil, uncovered, over medium-high heat. Boil for 5-8 minutes until the water has evaporated from the surface of the rice and craters appear on the surface. Stir once to bring the under layer of rice to the top, cover the pan and reduce the heat to the lowest setting. Cook for 8-10 minutes (less time for an electric stove, more time for a gas stove), turn the burner off, and let the rice sit untouched for 10 minutes on the burner.

Meanwhile, prepare the yogurt sauce. Combine the yogurt and salt in a medium bowl.

Heat the oil in a small pan over medium-high heat, add the mustard seeds, cover, and cook until they pop and then stop popping. Add the urad dal and cook, stirring constantly, until they turn golden brown. This will take less than a minute. Remove pan from heat, add the chiles, cilantro, and curry leaves, give it a stir, and dump it all into the yogurt.

Gently stir the yogurt mixture into the cooked rice and serve. It is gorgeous stuff--creamy from the yogurt, but with a crisp crunch and bursts of grassiness and heat from the chiles, and a different, nutty crunch from the urad dal. Iyer describes it as his favorite comfort food, and I can see why.

I ate it with a pan-fried ripe plantain dipped in Scotch Bonnet sauce. This was a good if unorthodox combination, I thought, but some stir-fried greens to cut the richness would have been welcome too. (Spinach sauteed with garlic and cracked black pepper would be yummy.)

Notes: Following Iyer's recipe exactly, I ended up with rice that was still a little crunchy (I had to add a bit more water and put it back on the heat for a coupe of minutes, then it was okay). But I live at a high altitude, which can make rice cookery tricky.

Using the full 2 cups of yogurt resulted in a slightly porridge-y rice, which I didn't mind at all, but you could cut back the amount a bit or use a thicker yogurt (I used Trader Joe's "European Style organic," which is fairly runny.) Whole milk yogurt is probably best here.

I don't think this dish would work without the curry leaves. You could possibly get away with leaving out the urad dal, although I did like the nutty flavor and crunch it added.