CAMBRIDGE — In Nepal, says Bhola Pandey of his home country, most residents eat lentil soup and rice twice a day. Eating animal protein isn’t as common in the Himalayan nation.
Pandey owns Base Crave restaurant in the Huron Village neighborhood with his wife, Saraswati, and with Niranjan Pandey and Niranjan’s wife, Devika. The men are brothers and their wives are sisters.
The restaurant, which opened right before the pandemic lockdown, is a welcoming little spot. The two couples also own Mitho Restaurant in Winchester. Bhola Pandey started an organic farm in Nepal, and recently bought more acreage near Kathmandu. “We want to show the farmer they can actually make more money without pesticides and chemicals,” he tells me in a text.
The owners are especially interested in serving nutritious food. The place is known for the house specialty, traditional momos, which are small, chewy dumplings with beautifully pleated tops that arrive right from the steamer with a little bowl of tomato-based dipping sauce. You can order them filled with meat, poultry, wild boar, vegetables, or paneer.
I am just as interested in lentil dal soup, an important part of the Nepalese table. The soup comes in a brown pottery crock, the sort used to make French onion soup. The thick broth is golden, creamy, almost smooth, and very nourishing. It’s one of the vegan items on the menu and I wondered how this little bowl got its big flavors.
Bhola Pandey invited me into the kitchen at Base Crave to watch Saraswati make the soup. It begins with a cup each of masoor dal, which are pale red, almost pink, lentils, and moong dal, same size, but yellow. Saraswati puts the legumes into a small, old-fashioned pressure cooker with turmeric, the spice that gives the soup its golden color, along with Himalayan pink salt, ground cumin, and cayenne pepper. She adds water to cover the legumes and seals the pressure cooker, which starts to splutter and shoot out steam in two directions, as if it might explode any second now. Both Saraswati and Bhola ignore this. Nothing’s wrong. “The soup will be ready in 10 minutes,” he announces casually.
And it is. He turns off the flame and all the hissing and steam slow down and finally stop.
Saraswati heats olive oil in a skillet, adds a large pinch of whole cumin seeds, which pop in the hot oil, then browns chopped onion, sprinkles it with garlic powder, and tips it into the soup. Finally, she adds a couple spoonfuls of her own gingery tomato sauce to the skillet to heat briefly, and stirs that into the pot.
It looks like there’s nothing to it. Besides rice, it’s probably the simplest dish on the menu. No dairy products, no meaty broth, not even vegetable broth. This is a pot of soup made with lentils, water, a little tomato sauce, a judicious sprinkle of spices. It’s divine with garlic naan. At home, says Bhola, make it in an ordinary pot, and add a little fresh ginger and chopped garlic to the longer simmer.
It was kind of thrilling to be able to replicate the soup with very little effort in a soup pot. It only took a little longer than the restaurant’s pressure cooker method. It had that same beautiful golden color and deep taste and the flavors of toasted cumin seeds and fresh ginger were striking.
After I prepared my own, I tasted the version made by Base Crave again and liked theirs better. Same ingredients, same soup. But one major difference. The restaurateurs and many families before them have been making and sipping lentil-dal soup for generations — with the Himalayas as backdrop. Of course theirs tastes better. 344 Huron Ave., Cambridge, 617-945-1485, www.basecrave.com
Sheryl Julian can be reached at sheryl.julian@globe.com. Follow her on Twitter @sheryljulian.
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November 02, 2021 at 09:00PM
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A few ingredients add up to big flavors in this Nepalese lentil-dal soup - The Boston Globe
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