The first time I ate dal chawal arancini, I was sixteen and trying to impress an Italian neighbour at our family home in Lucknow. My nani had cooked dal chawal — yellow tarka dal, ghee-streaked rice, smoking-hot papad — and we had a leftover tiffin nobody wanted on a Monday morning. I shaped them into balls, rolled them in semolina, deep-fried them, and called them "Indian arancini" with the misplaced confidence of every teenager.
The neighbour ate one. Smiled politely. Walked out. I didn't think of that dish again for fifteen years.
Until a kitchen meeting in Cyber Hub
In 2018, while developing Farzi's winter menu, our team was looking for a small plate that felt as nostalgic as papad-namak but as photogenic as a cronut. Someone in the kitchen — I think it was Sandip — said, "What if we made a dal chawal ball?" The whole brigade laughed. Then we tried it.
It took us four weeks to get right. Here's why.
The science of the perfect arancini
Italian arancini work because risotto rice is starchy and gluey enough to hold its shape when fried. Indian basmati is the opposite — long, dry, separated, the very qualities we love it for. So our first batches fell apart in the fryer like sandcastles.
The trick, we discovered, lies in the dal. By using a thicker dal — closer in consistency to dal makhani than tarka dal — and folding the cooked rice into it while still hot, the dal acts as both binder and flavour-carrier. We rest the mix for four hours in the cold so the starches set up. The result holds its shape, doesn't burst, and gives you that thrilling soft-crunch contrast in the bite.
What makes ours, ours
Every plate of dal chawal arancini at Farzi Café Dehradun starts with three things:
- Dal: A blend of urad and rajma, slow-cooked overnight in a copper handi with brown onion, ginger and a finishing tadka of ghee, kashmiri chilli and kasuri methi.
- Rice: Aged basmati from Dehradun's own valley — fluffy, fragrant, with grains long enough to add visible texture to every bite.
- The crust: A panko-semolina mix with a pinch of nigella seeds for that microscopic crunch, fried in clarified butter until amber.
We finish the plate with a smoked tomato chutney made from char-grilled Roma tomatoes, a quenelle of papad churi (crushed roasted papad with onion and chilli), and three drops of green-chilli oil that look like punctuation.
Why it works on a rooftop in Dehradun
There's something fitting about serving this dish in the hills. Dal chawal is what the families around us eat for Sunday lunch. By rolling it into a fried ball and putting it on a slate plate, we're not making it fancy — we're making it portable. You can eat one between sips of cocktail, on a curtained cabana, while the mist comes down from Mussoorie. It's the food equivalent of pulling on a hoodie over a wedding outfit. Familiar and slightly wrong, and exactly right.
And — bonus — every time someone takes the first bite, their eyes go a little wide. After eight years on the menu, I still wait for that moment. Especially in Dehradun, where the mountains lean in to watch.
Want to try it?
The dal chawal arancini sit on our small-plates section at ₹ 545. Order them as the first course, with a Saffron Sour — you can make the cocktail at home too, see our Curry Leaf Gimlet recipe for how we approach house-made cordials. Tell your server it's your first time — we'll send out a single extra one for the table.