Help! What is Rajasthani Besan Gutta? How do I make it? What's it usually called?

I brought back some hing (asafoetida) from Rajasthan and want to make some gatte, the chickpea flour "dumplings" that are made by rolling the dough in long cylindars and cutting off about 1-inch lengths and simmering them in a yogurt curry sauce. Does anyone have a recipe for this?

I googled and found this. Hope it's what you want. Sounds yummy!

http://www.bawarchi.com/contribution/contrib2892.html

Thanks for the quick response! I'll try this recipe, which is a version of what I'm looking for. This one didn't have a yogurt-based curry sauce.

Do you cook with hing a lot? I'll need to find ways to use my lifetime supply of it!

I use asafoetida a fair bit. The key is to use it very sparingly. Basically you can use it anywhere you would use garlic! For this reason, it is not normally used in a recipe that already contains onions and/or garlic. Asafoetida certainly does not have to be limited to Indian cookery!

Over the course of many years I took Indian cooking classes, bought alot of different cookbooks both in India and here (USA) and enjoyed the long process of making recipes. 6 hours to make dinner and 20 min. to eat it!!

Then a big variety of Indian restaurants opened where I lived, including So. Indian food and I all but stopped cooking it myself.

When I moved 1 1/2 years ago I gave away almost all my treasured cookbooks, Indian cooking gear as well as my lifetime supply of hing!!

Hi Gulab Jamun

This recipe happens to not contain hing but sure you can add it anyway. But it includes the curry sauce recipe.

Gatta Ke Saaq

Ingredients
Gram flour dough
250grams Chickpea flour
Water to make dough
Pinch salt
1/4tsp Red Chillies
¼ tsp Tumeric
¼ tsp Cumin
1 tbsp Oil

Curry
1 tbsp Oil
5 grams Cumin
¼ tsp Red Chillies
¼ tsp Tumeric
Pinch Salt
1 medium Sliced Onion
½ tsp Corriander Powder
½ cup Curd
Corriander leaves to garnish

Method
To make dough
Mix all the ingredients with the water gradually to make a dough.
Make balls out of small lemon sized pieces and roll them like a long snake.
Put it gently into a pan of water to boil for a minute.
Remove and drain leave open to let the excess water evaporate.
When cool cut into ¼ inch pieces.

For Curry
Heat oil
Put cumin in when hot seed will make a cracking sound then add the onion to it.
When the onion becomes golden brown put in the red chillies, tumeric salt and Corriander powder.
Stir a little so the oil comes out of the ingredients add curd and a little water to thin the sauce.
Add the Gram flour dough pieces in the curry and stir.

Your curry is now ready to serve garnish with coriander leaves and eat it with tawa Chapattis.

But remember the only problem is..that they do not turn out to be good many times...

it needs a lot of expertise and experience to make proper gatte..Gravy can be made..infact it can be made perfectly each and everytime..

However the real trouble is Gatte itself...they need to have a certain degree of softness in them so that they break easily while eating...and that softness is something that doesn't come easily..

Thanks everyone for your helpful posts. I will be experimenting in the kitchen soon!

Hi all,

I was in India a few years ago and when travelling in Rajasthan chanced across something called besan gutta (no idea if i've got the spelling correct - I think it was pronounced with a hard U, like in gutter). It was little pellets (i presume of besan) in a curry sauce. Try as I might, I can't find a recipe for this; the fact that I had it in numerous places leads me to think it's fairly common and I'm getting the name wrong. Is anyone familiar with this dish? It was (imho) far and away the best thing I ate in Rajasthan.

You can find the recipe here.

http://kitchen.suchna.com/recipe.html?user=&id=1

Yes..I belong to a family of Rajasthani background, and am very much familiar with this dish and also the fact it takes years of practice to get it right..

try Aishah, she might have a written recipe for this..however its a fairly complicated thing to make and has different styles of the same...

be call them Belle (bay-lay) over here....the curry is also made of Besun and curd..

I have a recipe - but must say I find Gutta Curry rather stodgy and fills you up very fast! Still, now and again, nice for a change. I looked at Himmat01's first link and my recipe is very similar so you could go by his. The only difference is that I don't use fennel seeds instead have about half a teaspoon of turmeric pwdr and about 2 teaspns coriander pwdr in the gutta mixture. The gravy is more 'complicated' in the link but probably more tasty than the one I do, so go with that! If you leave one or two spices out not to matter (including hing) - basically spices I use are turmeric, red chilli, cumin seeds (you crackle these in oil first) and coriander. Actually, I think the link recipe would be more delicious than mine!!

Do you know what makes it so tricky to get right? looking over the recipe now, it really doesn't seem that hard - kneading the gatta itself seems to be the only part that could go wrong.

edit: i just saw the post a few below about (non-besan) gatte. Apparently the trick is in the kneading; that'll teach me for not reading the whole forum.

YES !! Thats the big thing !! not the gravy, it all depends on the softness to the right level and quality to melt in mouth...it depends on kneading and ingredients as well...

Some times they come out really hard to chew, sometimes they are very soft...the right balance is tough to achieve.

soag - I think Gatta Curry is a fiddle-faddle type of recipe! but that is only because really I like making tasty things in a hurry. if you enjoy spending time in the kitchen (which i don't!)then easy for you to do. Just go step by step through the recipe - tricky because of kneading, also you are making two dishes at the one time and then combining them, so time-consuming. Good luck with your cooking and let us know how it turns out!
Cross-posted with Shashank - yes, that chewy sort - yuck!! i have had them a couple of times out in restaurants and you can hardly swallow the pieces because you can't chew them down. I prefer them soft even if they go gooey in the gravy!! BTW - is that your baby Shashank, very cute and is he chewing gatta pieces???