Poached Eggs with Chana Makhani

Annie is great at giving me ideas for dinner and something she said sparked me to poach some eggs and smother them in a low-fat chana makhani. I have a hard time eating a traditional makhani sauce, tomatoes with onions, spices, and lots of cream. Granted that it is one of the classic Indian sauces, but the cream gives my stomach fits. So I decided to try to fake the sauce with a bit of low-fat yogurt instead of cream and the results, while not the same as a classic makhani, were delicious.

Poached Eggs with Chana Makhani

Chickpeas, chana dal (or the black ones, kala chana), are one of my favorite legumes. I especially love popping the fresh ones right out of their pods and snacking them, but in any form, they are wonderful.

To start this dish, I sautéed some finely minced onion with whole cumin seeds until the onions started to brown a bit on the edges and the cumin seeds started to pop, then added a bit of ginger, a good bit of garlic, and a quick garam masala that I threw in my spice mill. Next in, a rough purée of  tomatoes and some chickpeas. I added a half a cup of low-fat yogurt along with water to cover the chickpeas and let the dish simmer for 90 minutes.

The resulting dish as you see above was delicious, the egg yolks blending into the sauce and adding some of the unctuousness that the heavy cream would have added. Still, the sauce was missing the silky texture and harmonious flavors that cream brings to the party. The low-fat yogurt with all its binders will never fully integrate with the sauce and leaves little speckles of white in the sauce.

All in all, it was a good compromise for a waist-friendly dish that is light on dairy and fat.