Where Did Bengaluru’s Love Affair with Dosa Originate?

The only motivation for me to wake up early on a Sunday morning is to eat my favourite butter masala dose or dosa with filtered coffee. The joint near my home in Bengaluru serves the most crispy and buttery dosas ever!

This love affair with the dish is common to most Bengaluru residents. In 2023, the citizens of the garden city ordered a whopping 29 million dosas — with an average of 122 dosa per minute just during breakfast hours!

All these sky-touching numbers make one think — how did this delicious dish come into existence? Well, we did some research and came across some amazing theories.

The most intriguing story comes from Udupi when a cook fermented some rice in an effort to make alcohol. Failing in doing so, he poured the fermented batter on a hot pan and voila — he accidentally gave the world its first dosa!

Some believe that the dish was concocted in Tamil Nadu in the first century. While others believe that the Chalukya King Someshvara III who ruled Karnataka around 1126 CE jotted down the recipe for dosa under the name dosaka in his book ‘Manasollasa’.

Whatever the origin story may be, the dish that was created centuries ago is loved across the world even today!

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Did you find these theories interesting? Here is a short video that you can watch:

(Edited by Pranita Bhat)