Besan Ka Pura

The third dish for our Week 5 Indian cooking class. At the top of our recipe, our tutor wrote:

Besan ka pura or as popularly known as besan chilla is an easy protein rich pancake recipe made from a chana flour based batter.  The delicious besan ka pura can be relished with green chutney.

This is a lovely savoury pancake, which is great for a lunchtime meal - you can add pretty much anything to it. Next time, I think I'll try adding some bacon pieces, and will fry the onion up in advance (rather than putting it in raw). I also left the chilli out, so mine was a fairly 'tame' pancake, suitable for the kids to eat.

Ingredients:
1 cup chana flour (Bengal gram flour)
1 green chilli, finely chopped
little coriander (dhania) leaves
salt to taste
1 small onion, finely chopped
1 tomato, finely chopped
1 egg
1 slice of bread
oil to cook
little water

Method:
1. Wet the slice of bread with water and crumble it.
2. In a bowl, mix chana flour, salt, chilli, coriander, onion, tomato, bread and egg with a little water (spreading consistency)
3. Heat a non-stick frying pan and put one teaspoon of oil on it to grease the pan.
4. Put one serving spoon of batter on it and spread it like a pancake.
5. Lift it carefully after 40 seconds to check if it has been cooked to a golden brown colour, then flip it over to cook the other side and pour 1 teaspoon (or as required) oil all around it.  When both sides are evenly cooked, remove it from the pan.

Serve with coriander chutney or tomato ketchup.

Variation:
To make it more nutritive, add finely grated carrots and green peas to the batter.