Healthy Watermelon Dosa

What do you do with the watermelon peel after you have eaten up the juicy fruit? Or what do you do if unfortunately your watermelon is not sweet and ends up tasting like cucumber? Well, you make a dosa out of it either ways! The watermelon that I had picked up in this weeks grocery was nice and juicy. Once I finished chopping up the watermelon into slices, I was sighing at the amount of peel that had to be trashed. That's when I remembered about this watermelon dosa that is made in parts of South India. What is done is, the white part of the watermelon, remaining after the red part is cut out is ground with the dosa batter to make a Healthy Watermelon Dosa.

Ingredients for Watermelon Dosa

2 cups of Dosa Rice or Parboiled Rice
1 cup of watermelon peel
1/2- 3/4 cup of coconut shavings
Salt to taste
Oil for greasing

Method to make Watermelon Dosa

In order to make the dosa, soak two cups of Dosa Rice/ Parboiled rice in enough water for about 4 hours. Coming to the watermelon, make sure that you had washed your watermelon thoroughly before you started cutting it. After you have scooped out the inner flesh for eating, gather your watermelon peel. Proceed to use a peeler and peel out the green part of the outer cover of the watermelon. What will remain is the white portion. You need about one cup of this peel. Grate some coconut such that you get about 1/2 to 3/4 (the more you add, the softer your dosa turns out) cups of coconut shavings.

Grind all these ingredients to a fine batter, adding very little water, since you get enough water from the watermelon itself. What you get is a light pink dosa batter that you need to leave for a couple of hours to ferment. The batter will not rise like the regular dosa batter since we do not add any urad dal to this.
I generally soak the rice in the evening, grind it in night before sleeping and use it for breakfast the next day.

To make the dosas, heat your griddle and pour a little oil on it. Now pour a ladle of the dosa batter on the griddle and with gentle hands spread it as thinly as possible. Remember that the batter will be a little runny and the dosa is not as easy to make as the urad-rice dosa. If you use a non-stick pan, you can pour the batter and swirl it around like how you make a crepe.

Pour a few drops of oil over the dosa. Cover it and allow it to cook for a minute. Now flip the dosa. Cook it evenly on both sides such that it gets a light brown tinge here and there.

That's about it. Your healthy watermelon dosa is ready to be served. I served it with some fiery hot red-chilli peanut chutney and a spoonful of sweet liquid jaggery.