Oooh, daal bukhara on a cookery show. On “Cook na kaho”. Must be easy. Images of hot, simmering, yummy, and oh-so-eclectic-tasting too, dal come to mind. And so I think as idly channel surfing I come upon this guy getting ready to go about some serious cooking. So I think. So it seems. And me, like other normal folk, cook dal the easy way, the plain way, you know microwave raw dal in microwave for about 30 minutes until pulpy soft, mash and add tadka. Easy, yeah ?

But, us mortal won’t-cook-until-neccesary folks like a little exotic khana once in a while. Hence need to watch “daal bukhara” demonstration. So this is what Upen Patel (as I find out later), he with the mix of the Brit. and African accent (the soft T’s) does :

1. Slices onions up and deep fries them (Whoa! Deep-fry ! Why deep-fry when you can shallow-fry ? Oh, I get it – life too painful and all, yeah ? Let’s get it over by ingesting loads of oil, should make that stupid heart stop dead in it’s tracks, what ?)

2. Then, while onions are frying, heats up another pan, and picks up a scissor and a packet of (gasp!) PRE_COOKED dal. Snip ! Snip! The PRE_COOKED dal is in the pan and heated up.

3. Last, add fried onions to PRE_COOKED daal, simmer, and garnish.

Now, I like food easy. But not that easy ! Since when did it become legit. to use PRE_COOKED daal to make daal-bukhara ON A COOKERY SHOW ? What about the boiling, the adding of spices, the . . . I don’t know, the name “daal bukhara” deserves more time and more justice done to it. I don’t need instruction to make daal bukhara from pre-cooked dal, although it would have been most helpful if the camera had actually panned on the brand of pre-cooked dal Patel used (his mom’s favorite, he said).

Serious hoodwinking in the name of cookery, I say.

Categories : _food , _television