Quick dinner: Instant Pot pot-in-pot dal and rice

There are approximately one bazillion different types of dals in this fine world, and there is no way I could ever hope – or even want – to pick just one in my rotation. In my pantry, I usually stock chana dal (hulled, split garbanzos), masoor dal (split red lentils), moong dal (split mung beans), toor dal (or toovar dal, split pigeon peas), and whole garbanzo beans, along with various other bits and bobs. I mostly buy from the bulk section, but I really like the Trikona brand, which is from Kent, Washington, and I buy my toor dal in enormous (organic) bags from Costco. Having this variety on hand might seem excessive, but each of the dals has its own character, and each fits differently into a meal. I’m working my way through Madhur Jaffrey’s Vegetarian India, which has a beautiful enormous chapter on dals, each one more mouth-watering than the next. She often has you mixing different dals together, which is just tremendously exciting.

TO BE CLEAR, I’m a white girl from New England, I have just never met a dal I didn’t love. I properly discovered Indian food in college – weekend Indian buffet brunch was a regular staple, though at the time I had some kind of weird interaction with something in the cooking (I never figured out what it was, but it was very sad) and every time I ate it, I got what my roommates and I referred to as “dying” – which required me to immediately exit the restaurant and breathe deeply until the truly terrible feeling subsided. Perhaps alarmingly, it took me a very long time to decide this horrible feeling maybe wasn’t worth it; I had a sabbatical from Indian food that ended once I moved to Thailand, and I’ve been great gang-busters without any ill effects since. A mystery of my past life.

The greatest thing about my favorite dal dishes – apart from their comforting, earthy warmth – is that my kiddos also love them. If I had to draw a Venn diagram of my family’s food preferences there would be only the tiniest overlapping area for the four of us, and right smack in the middle would be dals.

The trouble with dals? Some of them take forever, especially if you’re cooking your beans from dried, which I pretty much always am. And then, even if you’ve figured out using your Instant Pot to make your dal, you still have to make your rice. Which of course you could do on the stovetop, but you’ve already mastered doing it in your Instant Pot so ARGH. What are you supposed to do? Sequential rice then dal? Or dal then rice? Fussy and impractical, I say.

The answer? Pot-in-pot rice and dal. You cook the dal in the Instant Pot liner, while simutaneously cooking the rice in a pot set above it. The key is to pick a rice and a dal that cook at approximately the same rate. I have some dals I do with brown rice, some with white, and all have been quite successful. To do this, you need to have the right equipment. I use an 8-inch stainless steel Blanda Blank bowl from Ikea and a tall trivet that came with a different appliance. I don’t think that the rack that comes with the Instant Pot gives enough height to have the rice clear the dal cooking below it.

The dal recipe below is a mash-up from a range of different recipes – some from Madhur Jaffrey’s Vegetarian India, some from her book World of the East: Vegetarian Cooking, but also some just from what I like to eat and how I like to mix up spices. I use a white basmati rice that I buy from the bulk section of our grocery. It’s quite nice, longish, and cooks up fluffy and even. I prefer it over white jasmine rice; because rices can be so different, you might have to experiment a bit with the water amounts and the timing. But if you try with a white basmati rice that has a medium to long grain, I think you’ll be very happy.

Also, my children will run screaming with their mouths aflame if I include any heat in anything I make. They sometimes complain that black pepper is too spicy. I know this is going to change and in ten years they’ll be able to eat things much spicier than I can handle, but for now, I just leave it out. Feel free to add it back in, I suggest amounts and timings below.

There are usually a few stages to cooking a dal, and this recipe is no exception. The dal cooks in the Instant Pot along with a few spices, but the real flavor punch comes from the tarka, a mix of spices that you cook at high heat in oil. In this recipe, you add it at the end. It looks so good, you’ll be tempted to eat it plain. This dal recipe makes a quite soupy dish, which I like, because it soaks into the rice and is divine. If you like a stiffer dal, you could definitely safely cut back on the water.