This Mississauga restaurant serves up the perfect dosa, inspired by Bangalore

Jason D'Souza: Fair to say, dosas are in your top 10 foods of all time? 

Suresh Doss: It's my top 10 dishes. It's something that I still enjoy to this day, when I visit my mom. The mere experience of tearing off a piece of dosa that's hot off the tawa (a round, flat metal pan), and then dipping it into this assortment of chutneys…there's nothing more nostalgic for me. 

Jason: I love that dosas have become so common. But growing up, it was less so. One of my favourite things to do was to take friends to a dosa place. We would go overnight. A lot of the times, it was their first time. It's such an experience. You get this plate of this massive, savoury pancake. I just love seeing people experience their first dosa. 

Suresh: So as you mention, in the GTA now, we have an abundance of restaurants in the GTA that have dosa. It is ubiquitous, but let's talk about quality. Generally I think the dosas that people are used to are the crisp, almost paper-thin styles of dosa. 

The crumble very easily, and these dosas generally don't have a flavour, they're a vessel for the dip. The perfect dosa in my opinion, has crunch on the perimeter, with a soft interior. It's somewhat pancake-y.

It should have that fermented essence. You should be able to taste it and enjoy it without any dips.

Jason: So where are we going to get this perfect dosa?

Suresh: We're heading to Mississauga. A city where there is absolutely no shortage of regional dosas from various parts of India

We're going to Brandon Gate Plaza. It is a small strip mall with a number of great food businesses, where you will find Shailendra Jayaraj. Shailendra is a former IT professional that quit the industry after 25 years. 

He basically said that he found that there was a certain style of food that wasn't being represented properly. In particular, a style of dosa. 

Mysore Darshini has a number of great dishes on the menu. There are vegetarian stews and curries, and great rice dishes. Recently I had this incredible tamarind rice dish. That's where Shailendra basically cooks rice in a wok with tamarind powder, groundnut and mustard seeds and curry leaves. It is outstanding.

There is also a dish called chicken 65, which is fried chicken tossed with garlic, jeera seeds and hot chili garlic sauce. 

The menu demands repeat visits, but the dosas steal the show.  There are about a dozen versions, and the one that stands out the most is this Mysore-style dosa.

Shailendra goes through a process to make it, the same way his grandma does by using a wet grinder to make a rice and lentil batter. That is left to ferment for 36 hours. 

The batter goes from being an inch thick to about three or four inches. That's the mother batter that he uses for his menu. And it's not just that, there's a certain technique, too.

Jason: Tell me about it. 

Suresh: So as a shortcut, you can use baking powder or oil to get the texture and speed that you want. 

What Shailendra does is he cooks the dosa on residual heat on a large tawa. So the tawa is fired up and then he turns it off and pours the batter and spreads it in a circular fashion.

This gives it this even browned layer. It is evenly cooked from edge-to-edge with no bubbles or burning. He then flips the pancake to seal the soft interior, stuffing it with a very great masala. 

So the dosa arrives at the table, it has this really show-stopping brown seal to it. It's served with four dips: red chutney that has tomatoes, garlic and onions, green chutney that has mint, coconut, coriander and spices, a coconut and lentil chutney, which I love. And the sambar, which is essentially a wonderfully aromatic vegetable stew. 

Jason: And you know this. A lot of folks feel differently about the different chutneys served. Do you have a favourite chutney?

Suresh: I didn't know this would be so divisive. Anything coconut would win for me. For me, I am my mom's child. For me, it's coconut and mint or coconut and pepper. I would go to that first before I would move onto a Sambar. 

Jason: It's first thing in the morning but I think I need to go for a dosa. 

Suresh: I think you will be very satisfied with this dosa.