Dosa is the ever-popular South Indian breakfast of crispy crepes made with fermented rice and lentil batter. With just a handful of ingredients learn to make the classic Dosa recipe from scratch with my easy video and step-by-step photos. I also cover making your own dosa batter in a blender or mixer-grinder, tips on fermentation and cooking dosa to help you make the best dosa – crispy, soft and so good to dunk in a bowl of Coconut Chutney or piping hot Sambar.

Soaking the lentils, rice, making the batter, fermenting the batter calls for time, planning and some prep work. So for your ease of understanding, I have divided this step by step guide into 4 main parts:

Soaking rice and lentils

Making dosa batter in a blender or mixer-grinder

Fermenting dosa batter

Making dosa.

In a bowl take ½ cup idli rice or parboiled rice along with ½ cup regular rice. Instead of adding regular rice, you can also make the dosa with a total of 1 cup idli rice as I have shown in the video. Kindly note that the video has the recipe ingredients doubled in proportion.
To the same bowl, add ¼ cup urad dal and ⅛ teaspoon fenugreek seeds (methi).
Rinse the rice, lentils and methi seeds together a couple of times and keep them aside.
In a separate bowl, take 2 tablespoons of thick poha (flattened rice or parched rice).
Rinse poha once or twice in water and then add to the bowl containing the rinsed rice+lentils+methi seeds.
Add 1.5 cups of water and mix. Cover with a lid and soak everything for 4 to 5 hours.
Drain all the water and add the soaked ingredients to a mixer grinder or a blender.
Add ⅔ to ¾ cup water and grind or blend till you get a fine grainy consistency of rice in the batter. A smooth consistency of the batter is also fine.

If the mixer gets heated up, then stop and wait for some minutes. When the mixer cools down, grind again.

Depending on the jar capacity, you can grind everything once or in two batches. I ground in two batches and added a total of ¾ cup water.

Now take the batter in a large bowl or pan. In case the dosa batter becomes thin, then add a few tablespoons of rice flour to thicken it. Mix the rice flour very well in the batter.
Add ½ teaspoon of edible rock salt. Mix very well. Instead of rock salt, you can use non-iodized salt or sea salt crystals or Himalayan pink salt.
Cover and allow to ferment for 8 to 9 hours or more. The time of fermentation will vary depending on the temperature conditions, climate and altitude.

In winters, the time of fermentation can go up to 14 to 24 hours. If you live in a cold city or high altitude then I highly recommend fermenting the batter in an Instant pot if you have one.

I have listed below more fermentation tips and suggestions including fermenting dosa batter in an Instant pot. So do read these handy and helpful tips.

In the below photo, you see the dosa batter after 11 hours of fermentation. A proper fermentation will double or triple up the volume of the batter with a light sour aroma.

Now lightly stir the batter, before you begin to make dosa. You will also see many tiny air pockets in the batter. As you see in the below photo, the batter is very well fermented.

After that you cooked a Dosa in low flame.

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