Dhingri Matar

Dhingri Matar is a dish made with mushrooms and peas. The dhingri matar recipe typicaly involves a korma style curry with peas and in modern age button mushrooms. I believe traditionally these could have been variety of foraged mushrooms. When we could buy some morel mushrooms or gucchi and kings trumpet mushrooms at the dane county farmers market, those were the mushrooms we used for the dhingri matar.

Instead of counting on a traditional recipe for dhingri matar we decided to go with a sauce based on the pea puree itself. Its still a very aromatic and creamy sauce in texture, surprisingly very much like a korma.

The Dhingri

The mushrooms were brushed to take the dirt off and then the morel tips were sautéed in butter followed by chunky pieces of the kings trumpet mushrooms. The morels are intensely aromatic and nutty while the kings trumpet get meaty in texture from the pan sautéing with caramelized edges adding to the flavors.

The stems of both mushrooms were also chopped and sautéed with some walnuts and made into a nutty sauce by being ground with some milk. We used this sauce warmed up to dress the peas.

The Matar

To make the peas based korma like sauce, we melted some chopped onions and cashews along with a cardamom. We also added some white pepper and ginger juliennes and added some water.

We cooked the peas gently for four to five minutes till their color turned vibrant green. We then let them cool down a bit and with some sea salt added pureed them to very very creamy and fine puree. Taste this warm with your eyes closed and you might be not wrong in believing you are trying a very simple but aromatic malai korma.

We cooked rest of the peas simply in salted boiling water, drained and blanched them, then we added half of them to the walnut and mushroom sauce to dress them and warmed the sauce up gently. We kept the other peas warm as we believe perfecty cooked peas on their own lend wonderful sweet pop to any dish.

The ginger and cumin foam

Instead of mixing the sauce with any cream we steeped some fresh ginger and cumin in warm milk and then drained it and used the milk foam keeping the texture light and the cream flavors playful and light. To make the milk foam start with the chilled steeped milk. Foam with a milk frother. Then warm the milk. It will rise and you expand and you can then aerate it a bit again. Then let this settle a bit and cool down. As it cools down it will get firmer (if you try plating as a test while hot you will see this collapses)

Morels, kings trumpet and peas – Dhingri Matar

We plate by smearing the warm pea based korma like puree. Spoon some of the peas dressed with the walnut mushroom cream in clusters. We then top these to cover them with the pan sautéed king trumpet mushroom pieces and the morels. Follow this by adding some of the simply cooked vibrant green peas.

We had a few mustard blossoms so thats what we finished off with after adding the ginger and cumin foam.