R010Kadala Curry
Black chickpeas with roasted coconut, the partner of puttu
From the book by Reshmi R Nair
Kerala food, re-engineered
for the body you live in.
Not a diet that asks you to give up your grandmother's cooking. 137 recipes made the way Kerala has always made them — with the numbers attached, so you can see exactly what each one does to your blood sugar, your waistline and your heart.
Cook by chapter
Thirteen chapters of Kerala cooking, from the mother preparations to a full Onam sadya.
Four words, and no prohibitions
The whole argument of the book fits in four words. Everything else is technique.
One
Portion
The largest lever, and the one that needs a number. A quarter of the plate is 125–150 g of cooked rice. Weigh it once and you can serve by eye for life.
Two
Polish
A purchasing decision made once at the shop. Unpolished parboiled matta measures a glycaemic index of 38 against 79.6 for the same variety milled to 9.7% polish.
Three
Pulse
50 g cooked, minimum, on every plate that carries rice. Brown rice with legumes cut the five-day glycaemic response by 22.9% against white; the grain swap alone got 19.8%.
Four
Plate
Half vegetables, a quarter grain, a quarter protein. Rice eaten off that plate behaves differently from the same rice under a poured curry.
Start here
Nine recipes that carry the argument. Each one gives per-serving energy, protein, fibre, net carbohydrate and sodium.
R010
R002Puttu, Matta Rice
The steamed cylinder, made with red parboiled rice
R015Matta Rice, Properly Cooked
Kerala's parboiled red rice, by absorption and by draining
R027Ayala Varuthathu, Baked
Mackerel with a chilli-masala rub, in a very hot oven
R069Avial
Mixed vegetables in coarse coconut-cumin paste, finished with raw coconut oil
R023Kerala Khichdi
Matta rice and moong dal in one pot, with coconut and curry leaf
R086Rasam
Tamarind and pepper broth, the third rice course
R081Moru Curry
Tempered buttermilk curry with ground coconut
R011Cherupayar Curry
Whole green gram with ground coconut, light and quick
Measured on actual Kerala preparations
Most glycaemic index tables test foods nobody in Kerala eats. These were measured on the real thing.
| Preparation | Malayalam | Reported GI | Band |
|---|---|---|---|
| Red rice puttu | puttu | 38 | Low |
| Rose Matta rice, cooked | matta | 38 | Low |
| Broken-wheat upma | — | 41 | Low |
| Whole-wheat puttu | puttu | 45 | Low |
| Whole-wheat roti | — | 45 | Low |
| Oats puttu | puttu | 51–52 | Low |
Values reported by Pavithran et al. (2020) on Kerala preparations. Glycaemic index is a property of a food as tested, in the people tested — read it as a direction, not a dose. The full caveat is here.
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Read the entire book on this site
All 25 chapters and 351,617 words — the argument, the pantry, every technique, all 137 recipes, the programme, the reference tables, the glossary and the bibliography.
The book
Everything on this site, and the half that isn't
The complete work runs to over a thousand pages: the mother preparations, the technique chapters, swap tables, per-100 g composition for every ingredient, the sodium and potassium arithmetic, a full Onam sadya, a 28-day plan and a sourced bibliography.