What You Are Making
Pour a ladle of batter onto a hot tawa and you can tell at once whether you are making a dosa or an uttapam. For dosa, the ladle swings outward in a quick spiral and the batter goes lacy and thin. For uttapam, the ladle barely moves. The batter sits in a thick round, small bubbles come up and pop through the surface, and the edges set slowly while the middle stays wet. Then the vegetables go on, and the smell changes from sour and yeasty to something sweeter as the onion begins to soften in the heat. The batter is exactly the same one used for dosa and idli. What differs is thickness and patience. The result is spongy and soft inside, like a savory pancake, with a thin, caramelized crust on the side that touched the pan.
Because the pancake is thick and cooks gently, uttapam forgives beginners more than dosa does. There is no single sweeping spreading motion to master, which is where most first dosas go wrong. It is also a useful home for batter that has fermented a bit longer than you would like for a crisp dosa. A slightly sourer, more bubbly batter suits a softer pancake very well.
The Dish’s Backstory
Dosa, idli and uttapam belong to one large South Indian tradition of fermented batter, and none of them has a documented birthplace. Cooks across Tamil Nadu, Karnataka, Andhra Pradesh and Kerala spent long centuries grinding rice and urad dal, letting the mixture sour and baking it on hot iron, and each region kept its own ratios and habits. The thick, vegetable-studded pancake we call uttapam is usually tied to Tamil Nadu and to the Udupi-style restaurants that took tiffin food around the country from the middle of the twentieth century. Families had been making it at home with local vegetables well before then and still do. Giving it to a single state would be inaccurate. It is better described as a thicker relative inside a shared repertoire, which reached the rest of India mainly by way of South Indian restaurants and tiffin houses.
At the Stove, Step by Step
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Prep
Soak, grind and let the batter ferment
Cover the rice with water in one bowl and the urad dal, with the fenugreek seeds, in another, and soak both for 4 to 6 hours. Grind each to a thick, smooth paste and blend the two in a big container with the salt. Put it in a warm corner for 8 to 12 hours. It is ready when it has roughly doubled, looks full of air and smells pleasantly sour. This is exactly the batter for dosa and idli. Uttapam puts no extra demands on the fermenting and cares only how thickly you pour.
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Prep
Chop the toppings small and dab off extra moisture
Cut the onion, tomato, capsicum, chillies and carrot into small, even bits. Uneven chunks cook at different speeds once they are pushed into the batter. A very juicy tomato should be blotted with a paper towel, because extra liquid stops the batter beneath it from setting and leaves a damp patch.
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Prep
Judge the batter's thickness
Look for batter a little thicker than the kind for dosa that still pours easily, something near a heavy pancake mix. Batter that has thinned while standing should not be diluted for uttapam. Use it at the thickness it reached by itself.
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Cook
Heat the tawa to medium
Place the tawa on medium heat, lower than the medium-high suited to dosa. A thick pancake needs a longer, softer heat, so the center cooks before the bottom scorches. Rub a little oil over the surface.
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Cook
Pour a thick round and mostly leave it
Scoop a ladle of batter into the middle of the hot tawa and push it outward just slightly, to a disc about half a centimeter deep, clearly thicker than a dosa. A neat spiral is not needed. A somewhat rough, pancake-style round is exactly right.
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Cook
Scatter the vegetables and press them in
Before the surface dries, sprinkle a modest handful of chopped onion, tomato, chilli and the other vegetables over it. Use the back of a ladle or a flat spatula to press them in lightly and evenly, so they set into the batter and do not slide around.
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Cook
Add oil and cook slowly
Trickle oil or ghee along the rim and across the vegetables. If you own a lid that fits, cover the pan and cook for 3 to 4 minutes on medium heat, until the base has turned deep gold and the top no longer looks wet and raw.
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Cook
Flip once, briefly
Slide a wide spatula under the pancake and turn it once, then leave the vegetable side down for only 1 to 2 minutes, enough for the toppings to soften and pick up a little color. This side finishes much faster than the first.
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Serve
Serve hot with chutney and sambar
Eat it right away with the vegetable side facing up, alongside coconut chutney and sambar. Because it is thick, an uttapam stays good a little longer than dosa does, but hot from the pan is still when it tastes best.
Stand-ins If You Are Short
Almost any finely chopped vegetables will do on top, and grated cabbage, chopped spinach or sweet corn are all common at home besides the usual onion, tomato and chilli. Store-bought dosa or idli batter, fresh or frozen, behaves the same way, as long as you use it at its natural, slightly heavier thickness. Grated cheese pressed in beside the vegetables is no tradition at all, yet some restaurants do it now.
Dial the Chilli Up or Down
There is no heat in the batter, so everything depends on what goes on top. Drop the green chilli to make a mild pancake, with onion, tomato and coriander giving the taste. To heat it up, use more chilli, or dust red chilli powder or cracked black pepper over the vegetables just before pressing them in, which keeps the sting near the surface.
Where It Goes Wrong
Thin batter, poured as for dosa, is the most frequent error. It leaves nothing for the vegetables to sink into and ends up as a dosa with toppings. A pan that is too hot is another, since the base browns long before the thick middle cooks, which gives a raw center under a dark crust. Vegetables cut too big or left wet are a third. Big pieces fall away when you turn the pancake, and wet tomato keeps the batter around it sticky. Last, leaving off the lid on the first side makes the middle slower to set and dries out the top.
Leftovers, Kept and Revived
Keeping: Fermented batter stays good in the fridge for 3 to 4 days, and it freezes for as long as a month. Bring it to room temperature and stir well first, as it thickens when cold. Chop the toppings fresh when you can. Onion and capsicum can be prepared a day early in a closed box in the fridge, while tomato should wait until just before cooking because it weeps. Cooked uttapam does not hold up and is best eaten the same hour.
Reviving: A dry pan on medium-low heat will warm leftover uttapam in a minute or two per side, bringing back some crispness underneath without drying the middle. That works better than a microwave, which turns the whole thing soft and a little rubbery. For several, heat them one at a time instead of stacking, since stacked warm pancakes trap steam and make each other limp.
Handle This Part Carefully
Once fermentation is complete, keep the batter in the fridge rather than leaving it out indefinitely. In hot weather it can drift from pleasantly sour to over-fermented and finally unsafe. Wash the topping vegetables well before cutting them. If you chop ahead, keep them covered and chilled, tomato and onion especially, since they can carry bacteria when left out for long. At the stove, change the griddle oil if it scorches and darkens during a long session, as oil heated repeatedly tastes bitter and is not good to eat often.