Calories in Pesarattu

Pesarattu is the Andhra dosa made from soaked whole moong, with no rice in this recipe and no fermentation. The source recipe uses 175 g of green gram, 120 g of onion and a little ginger with 1 tablespoon of oil and 2 tablespoons of ghee, and counts 14 pesarattus from the batch. It does not state how wide each one is, so the serving is one of those 14 portions, with about 12 g of moong in it. That is small. A pesarattu poured to cover a home tawa may hold a good deal more moong than that, and its calories should be counted accordingly.

Protein supplies 18% of the energy, carbohydrate 45% and fat 37%. The protein share is high for a dosa because the batter is all pulse. The fat share is high too, and the moong is not responsible: it comes from the 1/2 teaspoon of ghee and 1/4 teaspoon of oil used on each small pesarattu. The ghee is also the source of most of the saturated fat. On a larger pesarattu cooked with the same spoon of fat, the balance would shift away from fat and towards protein.

Because each one is small, think in plates. Two pesarattus come to 152 kcal and 6.6 g of protein; three come to 228 kcal and 9.9 g. A single pesarattu is about 4% of a sedentary man's daily energy requirement and 5% of a woman's. Three with ginger chutney make a light breakfast that still delivers a useful amount of protein, along with iron and fibre from the whole moong. It needs a vegetable or a fruit alongside more than it needs another protein food.

The 76 kcal figure flatters a normal-sized pesarattu, because the recipe's portions are small. A single large one served in a restaurant holds more batter and usually more ghee, and an upma filling adds again. Before using the number, estimate how much moong is in the pesarattu on your plate and how much fat it was cooked in.