Appam

Kerala Style Appam (വെള്ളയപ്പം  or പാലപ്പം)

If you ask anyone from outside Kerala, what is their favorite Kerala dish, chances are that you will hear appams as the answer. Traditionally, Appams are used as a breakfast dish in Kerala. Appam with egg curry or appam with stew, be it vegetable stew or chicken stew or mutton stew, is a favorite breakfast combination.

But outside Kerala, most of the Kerala restaurants serve appams at any time of the day. You can have appams for breakfast, lunch or dinner.


Traditionally appams are made in two different varieties. Today I am going to cover what is known as vellayappam (വെള്ളയപ്പം) or paalappam (പാലപ്പം). I will describe the easiest way of preparing appams so that anyone can try it at home.

Ingredients:
Rice                    2 cups
Boiled rice          1/2 cup
Grated coconut   3/4 cup
Yeast                  1/2 tsp
Sugar                 1 tbsp
Salt                    as needed
Water                 as needed

Method of preparation: 
1) Sock the rice in water for 3 to 4 hours. Add the remaining items and grind all of them together. Add water to the dough until the dough is consistently thick, not too watery or not too thick while poring it.

2) Keep the dough overnight for fermentation. When it gets fermented, it almost doubles up in quantity. So make sure you are keeping the batter in a vessel that is big enough for the batter.

3) The shape of the appam comes from the shape of the vessel used for preparing the appams. Use a deep round bottomed pan, which is called 'appam pan'. Heat the pan on the stove. Use some oil only if it is a not non-stick pan. (I regularly use the non-stick pan, and hence do not use oil).

4) Pour a ladle full of the dough into the pan. Lift the pan, tilt and turn it in a full circle so that the dough spreads uniformly into the sides. Keep the pan back on the flame and cover it with a lid. Because of the shape of the pan, most of the dough will settle in the middle, thus leaving the sides in a lacy design and the center thick.

5) The appam will be ready in a couple of minutes. Serve it hot with your favorite side dish.

Notes: 

1. Traditionally appams are fermented with kallu (toddy - the alcoholic drink from coconut trees or palm trees). In this recipe I have used yeast, since toddy is not widely available. However the appams fermented with toddy has a special taste.
2. Half cup of boiled rice is added to the rice before grinding it, this will help the appams to be softer. However, if the amount of boiled rice is more, chances are that the appams will turn more sticky.
3. Keep the batter overnight for fermentation. Now if the weather is too cold, it might be a good idea to use look-warm water to prepare the batter.
4. You can add coconut water instead of normal water, that will help fermentation. And with coconut water the appams will taste better.

Kappa Villayichathu (കപ്പ വിളയിച്ചത്)

Kappa Villayichathu (കപ്പ  വിളയിച്ചത്)

Have you ever wondered what kind of snacks our parents and grandparents devoured before the packets of junk food from the nearest super market started appearing on our dining tables ? For this week, I would like to write about something that our new generation wouldn't have ever heard of. Or for that matter many of us wouldn't have tasted it for many years. For me this is something that takes me back to my childhood, those rainy days of Karkkidakam when it used to rain 24 hours every day. The rain stops only to start again. And it always looks like the heaven is connected to the the earth by a ten thousand silver strings swaying with the wind. And that smell from the kitchen.. Grandma is busy with roasting the cashew nuts left over from last summer or preparing that crispy roasted tapioca. Ah... what a combination hot coffee and kappa villayichatu.. That's what I wanted to write about today, a crispy, mouth watering tea time snack made out of dried tapioca.

Another thing that I still remember is, once you prepare this dish, you can keep it for many days in an airtight jar and it will continue to be crispy. For that matter it was the chips-equivalent of olden times.

This is how the traditional version of it looks like, though you can prepare it in many different forms.

There are two steps in preparing this snack. The first one is preparing the dried version tapioca, typically done during the summer. (This was our forefather's technique of preserving the tapioca for the rainy days). The second step is deep frying the dry tapioca in oil. Below are the detailed steps.

1. Preparation of dry tapioca:
Clean the tapioca by removing the brown and pink layers of outer skin. Slice the tapioca into thin pieces, preferably in square shape. Refer to the picture above for the shape. Cook it in boiled water until the tapioca becomes half cooked (you can make this out when the tapioca becomes soft). Drain the water and sun dry the tapioca until it loses all the water content. Typically it takes three days of hot sun to get the tapioca really dry. Note that the pieces will be real hard when it is dry. People prepare dried tapioca in different shapes for different purposes. This particular shape of thin squares is for preparing snack items. It is ready to be preserved for the rainy season. Olden days people used to keep this for the entire year, until they are ready to harvest the next year.

2. Frying  the tapioca (കപ്പ  വിളയിക്കൽ)
Ingredients:
Dried tapioca                            1cup ( Need to deep fry this in oil);
Rice powder (red/white)           ½ cup;
Jaggiry syrup                             As needed

2.1 Frying the tapioca



Deep fry the dried tapioca in a pan. This is sometimes referred to as avilu kappa. Sometimes you can eat this fried tapioca just fried. If you want to eat it that way, adding salt and a bit of turmeric powder (by making a small pouch of turmeric powder in a cotton cloth and keeping it immersed in the oil to be fried) would be a good idea. You can also grind the deep fried tapioca, mix it with sugar/jagiry and coconut to make another delicious dish called avalosu podi.


2.2 Preparing the rice powder
Take rice in clay pot, keep it on flame, while stirring it well with wooden spoon until its color turns golden brown. To this add 3 cardamom, allow it to cool, grind in a mixer well to make a fine powder.

2.3 Preparing the snack
Take one vessel or plate and spread the fried kappa pieces in this. Spread the rice powder on top of this, so as to cover the tapioca pieces. Now pour the jaggiry syrup on top of this while the syrup is hot. Mix all together. Refer to the picture below. Your snack is ready. You can keep it in an airtight jar for many days. Refer to the picture below.