Pesarattu

The crown jewel of Andhra breakfast dishes, Pesarattu is a lesser-known version of Dosa made with green moong beans and served traditionally as a breakfast dish. The dish has a quirky history behind it and is also popularly known as the “MLA Dosa” or the “MLA Pesarattu”.

Legend goes that this particular variant was born in the State Legislative Assembly of Hyderabad. Not a part of their regular menu, the canteen of the Vidhan Sabha used to cook up this fascinating dish on special orders by the MLAs. The secret orders started gaining so much traction, that they outweighed requests for standard items on the menu. The method in which this Dosa is prepared involves stuffing the Dosa with Upma (another mixed vegetable and rice paste concoction, preferred during breakfast meals) instead of the regular Aloo Sabzi. The marriage of two such popular South Indian breakfast items gave rise to Pesarattu, a dish that has now put Hyderabad (and consequently, Andhra Pradesh) on the national foodscape map.

Done as a measure to spice up the drab menu in the state government canteen, the cooks decided to replace the usual urad dal mix (used for the Dosa) with the green moong dal, a choice that was utterly out of the blue but bore interesting results. The next step towards the Pesarattu was changing the contents of the Dosa. Once Upma replaced the potato filling, the MLA Dosa was born. The squishy, soft texture of Upma perfectly complemented the outer crispy Dosa, providing the optimum mouthfeel of gooey and crunchy simultaneously. In fact, this particular dish became so popular that it was promptly picked up by other states like Karnataka, Kerala and Tamil Nadu, which remained true to the original recipe as well as nomenclature. Thus, you could often find this oddly-named dish on one of the menus in any of the South Indian states you visit.