Cooking without oil, pan by pan: roti, sabzi, dosa, and what still needs fat

The general advice — use less oil — is easy to agree with and hard to act on, because oil is not one thing in a kitchen. It is a different decision in a dosa pan, a sabzi kadai, a pressure cooker and a tawa, and a rule that ignores that is a rule you will abandon in a week.

So this is the same argument as where the oil actually hides, organised by what is in the pan. For each dish: what does the work instead, and where the honest answer is that something still needs fat.

What replaces oil, in general

Four things do the work, and every dish below is a combination of them:

• Heat. A properly hot pan is the single biggest one, because the reflex when food sticks is to add oil. Food that hits a lukewarm pan sticks; food that hits a hot one often does not need anything under it.
• Water. Onions soften because they lose water and their walls collapse, not because they are sitting in fat. A splash and a lid does the same job in about the same time.
• Dry roasting. Whole cumin, mustard seeds and dried chilli bloom perfectly well in a hot dry pan. A teaspoon of oil added at the end then contributes flavour rather than heat transfer.
• Steam and pressure. Anything that can be steamed or pressure cooked is finished before the question of oil comes up.

Roti and chapati

This is the easy one, and worth stating plainly because it is where most households spend oil without thinking: a roti needs nothing on the tawa. The dough has no fat in it, the tawa is hot, and the roti puffs.

What happens afterwards is the actual decision. A teaspoon of ghee on a finished roti is about 40 calories and one of the best-value spends in an Indian kitchen — it makes the rest of the plate more likely to be eaten. We do it. We just do it deliberately rather than as part of the cooking.

Sabzi

The technique that matters here is the one the oil was standing in for:

1. Get the pan hot before anything wet goes in. Cold pan, wet vegetables, and you are now steaming something you meant to fry.
2. Give the onions water, not oil. Splash, lid, a few minutes. They will taste the same.
3. Let the vegetables release their own water, then let it go. Most vegetables are mostly water to begin with. Cook them until that water has evaporated rather than adding a liquid that then has to be dealt with.
4. Dry roast the spices first, then add them to the vegetables. You get the aroma a tadka was there to provide.

A bhindi fry made with a teaspoon and a splash of water is a different food from the same bhindi made with two tablespoons, and it tastes like bhindi. That is the point — you are not paying 200 calories for the texture of frying when the dish was not really fried.

Dal, and the tadka

The tempering is where the oil goes in most Indian kitchens, and it is the easiest place to cut in half without changing the dish: 2 tsp to the tadka is what an ordinary day spends, and both of those are gone before the dal is tasted.

Dry-roast the whole spices first. Then decide how much oil the finish is worth — a teaspoon poured over the finished dal carries flavour through the bowl, and it is being spent where you can taste it rather than where you cannot.

Dosa, uttapam and cheela: the honest exception

This is where we refuse the tidy version of the advice. A dosa on a bare pan does not work. The batter needs a film to crisp and release, and a dosa cooked without one is a pale, torn version of the dish that nobody in the house will ask for twice.

Our answer is not zero oil; it is a much smaller film:

• Heat the pan properly, then wipe 1/4 tsp over it with kitchen paper — about 1 g, which is about 10 calories, against the tablespoon or more a restaurant pan uses.
• Use the smallest pan the batter fits, so the film you do spend is spread over the batter rather than over the empty pan.
• A well-seasoned cast-iron or a good non-stick tawa needs less than a worn one, and a hot one needs less than a cool one.

The same applies to a cheela, with one advantage: a batter with soya, oats or besan in it holds together better than a plain one, so it needs less encouragement to leave the pan. That is the trick the soya post is about.

The three places fat is still worth spending

1. The finished dal. A teaspoon of mustard oil poured over a hot dal is 40 calories of flavour that makes the whole bowl better.
2. The roti. See above. Ghee on a roti is not a failure of the plan; it is the plan working.
3. Anything actually fried. A samosa is not a dry-pan dish and pretending otherwise is how people end up making a worse version of the thing they wanted.

What we do not claim

We are not saying oil is bad, that fat is not a nutrient, or that a zero-oil dish is always better than one cooked with oil. Most of the dishes we film still use some, deliberately. The problem — when there is one — is the invisible spoon in the middle of a normal Tuesday, and the fact that it never registers as a decision at all.

The version of this that works is one dish at a time: pick the sabzi you cook every day, halve the oil, and keep the change if it tastes the same. That is 100 to 150 calories a day, which is more than most people manage by giving up something they like — and where it sits in the rest of the plate is a separate question.

Watch “No oil pepper soya chicken” on YouTube

Watch “Zero-oil chicken haleem” on YouTube

Everything cooked this way is collected on the no-oil page, and every dish plays on the recipes page.