Bori (Bengali: বড়ি) is a form of dried lentil dumplings popular in Bengali cuisine. It is made from a paste of urad dal and winter melon which is sun-dried for 3–5 days. Once fully dried, it can easily last for about a year.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bori_(food)

I don’t usually think of dry beans as something that needs preserving. If you keep them dry and bug free they’ll last several years. But in East India, especially Bengal, they have developed a way to preserve dal in a way that makes it nearly instant food when you are ready to eat it.

Bori are sun-dried dumplings generally made with urad dal, although other types of dal are sometimes used. Once they are dry, they’ll keep for many months, and can either be deep fried as a crunchy snack, or tossed into a curry or just about any other dish for some added protein.

The simplest version of the recipe is simply soaked urad dal, ground to a paste and then dried, but there are dozens of variations, using different varieties of dal, adding various spices for different flavors, or even adding additional ingredients like winter melon or gourd. My recipe adds several different spices and some fresh ginger, which I suppose makes them masala bori.

Traditionally these are made by placing small mounds of ground dal on a clean cloth, or a tray, and leaving them out in full sun for a few days. Duluth, Minnesota doesn’t generally have a climate conducive to that method (especially this year), so I had to experiment. I lightly greased a cookie sheet and dried them in my oven, set to 175F (about as low as my oven goes), which took about 4 ½ hours. If I make these again I might try using my dehydrator. Most recipes said that bori should remain white as they dry, and mine did turn slightly brown.

Most Bengali homes would probably use a wet grinder^* to grind the dal, the same tool that is usually used to make idli or dosa batter. I, again, used my Blendtec^* blender, which did a pretty good job, although I have a feeling that I maybe had to add more water than is optimal to get the dal to grind.

Once the dal is ground to a smooth paste, it needs to be beaten until it’s light and fluffy. Traditionally that’s done with your hand, but most recipes I looked at used an electric mixer. That’s where I started to think that maybe I added a little too much water, as it didn’t get quite a fluffy as I was expecting, and the bori also wound up flatter than I expected as they dried. (It’s also possible that I over beat the batter, or that trying to get the batter into my crappy, broken, piping bag knocked a lot of the air out of it)

I used my mortar and pestle to grind the fennel seed and chilies, which left fairly large pieces. Depending on your preference you could also grind the spices in a spice grinder for a finer powder.

The unusual ingredient in this recipe is nigella seed^*. In India it’s known as kala jeera or kalonji , or in English it’s often called black cumin or black caraway. It has a distinct flavor, described as having notes of onion, oregano and black pepper. If you ever run across a recipe calling for onion seeds, these are what they are actually looking for.

Once the batter is beaten and spiced added, it gets spread out on your drying surface. Since I was using the oven, I used a lightly greased baking sheet. Traditionally, for sun drying, bamboo mats or lint free cloth is used. They are traditionally dropped by hand, making little mounds of batter, shaped somewhat like a Hershey’s Kiss. I dropped a few that way, then put the rest of the batter into a piping bag with a round tip. . Of course, after I had it in, I discovered my cheap plastic piping bag had a split in it, and my tip was too small so batter was squeezing out the side, and bits of fennel seed and chili pepper kept clogging the tip. Once I switched to a larger tip, I think it was still easier than dolloping it out with my hand, but did not save on the mess factor.

When wet, the batter will stick to whatever surface you have put it on, but once it’s dry it will easily come free of the surface.

In Bengal, there is an artistic form or bori, called gohona or gayna, where the batter is piped into intricate, jewelry-like, designs. (Gohona/gayna are based on the bengali word for jewelry).

I had intended to try these both fried and as part of another dish, but when I went to make the dish, I discovered that I only had enough bori for that recipe. (Ok, there were two extra, but it seemed better to add them to the curry, than heat a pot of oil just to fry two little bori).

I made aloo begun bori jhal, or potato, eggplant and bori in a mustard based curry. I’ll be posting that recipe separately, so I won’t say much more about it here, other than that the bori fell apart more than I expected, so stir gently, and soaked up a lot more juice than I expected, so make your sauce quite a bit more watery than you think you should. The flavors of nigella and fennel are quite distinct and I wasn’t quite sure if I liked them in that particular dish. Overall it was tasty, but there was something distinct and somewhat jarring in the flavor of the boris. (The fennel is probably the one that was sticking out to me, since there was some nigella in the jhal as well). I think it would have been great as a fried snack without the other flavors of the jhal to compete with.

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Bori

Yield: about 90 g/ 1 ½ cups
Prep: 20 minutes
Dry: 3 ½ -4 ½ hours in the oven
Total: 4-5 hours, plus 6 hours soaking

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