Chapter 13 — Equipment, and Which of It Matters
Kerala cooking was built by households that owned five vessels. Almost everything in this book can be made in a heavy pan, a lidded pot and a saucepan, and any writer who says otherwise is selling something. But three or four traditional pieces genuinely change the food, and one modern object — a cheap digital scale — does more for a reader trying to lose inches than every clay pot in Kottayam. This chapter is organised as buy this, buy this if you cook this food often, and skip this.
One piece of history belongs at the front, because it is uncomfortable and true. Vessel material in Kerala was never neutral. Certain metal utensils — kavadi kinnam, irumbu chatti, ottu kinnam — were historically associated with, and in some accounts imposed upon, oppressed communities, and were regarded by upper castes as polluted by that association even though they were made of expensive, durable metal. Clay served the poor before metal did. When we now pay a premium for hand-thrown earthenware, that is worth remembering.
Buy this
A digital kitchen scale. The argument is in its own section below, because it is the most important purchase in this chapter.
A heavy, deep pan. If it is a cheena chatti, so much the better. If it is a cast-iron wok or a heavy sauté pan, the food will not know. What matters is mass — thin pans scorch a tempering and stall when the shallots go in.
A lidded, heavy-based pot of 3–4 litres, for rice, kanji, stews and everything with coconut milk in it. A tight lid is the whole specification.
A pressure cooker, 3 or 5 litres. The unglamorous workhorse of this book. Kadala, vanpayar and muthira are the plate component this book will not negotiate on, and dried pulses without a pressure cooker mean 60–90 minutes at a simmer instead of 12–20 minutes under pressure — the difference between a habit and an intention. Stovetop or electric both work; the electric kind wins on not needing supervision, the stovetop on speed.
A wooden or coconut-shell turner — chattuvam — and a deep ladle, thavi. These cost almost nothing and they change the food, because wood and shell do not bruise. A metal spatula in a thoran cuts the vegetable pieces and turns the dish to mush; a chattuvam lifts and folds. If you buy one traditional item and it is not a clay pot, buy this.
Measuring spoons and portioning containers. See the measuring kit at the end.
Buy this if you cook this food often
The meen chatti (manchatti) — the one clay pot worth the trouble
An unglazed earthenware pot genuinely changes a fish curry, and the reasons are physical rather than mystical.
First, fired clay is chemically inert to acid. Kudampuli and tamarind do not react with it as they will with iron or aluminium, so the curry keeps its clean fruit-acid edge instead of picking up a metallic note.
Second, thermal mass and gentle residual heat. Clay heats slowly and holds what it has. The simmer it gives is softer than any metal pan's, which matters enormously for fish, since fish protein sets at low temperatures and a rolling boil is what breaks a curry's pieces into flakes. And when the pot comes off the flame it keeps cooking gently for several minutes, finishing the fish without the cook doing anything — which is exactly the window in which a kudampuli curry comes together.
Third, and most interesting, the wall of the pot is microporous. A little of every curry soaks into it and returns to the next one. A seasoned meen chatti is a flavour archive, which is why families refuse to throw one out and why they use it for nothing but fish. Cook a sweet dish in your fish pot once and you will understand the rule.
How to season one. New pots taste of raw earth and crack easily. Soak the pot in water for 12–24 hours, then rub the inside with coconut oil and heat it, empty, over the lowest flame for 20–30 minutes. Cook something forgiving in it two or three times — a thin fish curry, a kanji — before you commit a good piece of neymeen.
Care, and what breaks it. Never scour it with detergent; the pores will hold the soap and hand it back to your next curry. Warm water and a coir scrub or a soft brush, then dry it completely before storing, and never store it damp with the lid on. What kills clay pots is thermal shock: a cold pot on a high flame, a hot pot set on a wet counter, cold water into a hot pot. Heat it up gradually, always with something in it, and it will last years. Cracks usually appear as a hairline before they become a leak; a cracked pot can serve out its life as a mixing bowl.
Verdict: buy one 20–22 cm pot if you cook fish curry more than twice a month. Otherwise a heavy non-reactive pan makes the curry perfectly well, and you lose a little of the mineral edge and the second-day depth.
The uruli
Wide-mouthed, squat and shallow, cast in bell metal — a high-tin bronze — traditionally made by lost-wax casting in clay moulds at Mannar in Alappuzha, Kerala's "bell metal town". The geometry is the point: heavy metal absorbs heat slowly and holds it, and a wide mouth gives a large evaporating surface, which is exactly what you want for reducing coconut milk and jaggery without scorching — payasam, pradhaman, chakka varatti. You can stir a jaggery reduction in an uruli for an hour and it will not catch.
Verdict: magnificent, expensive, a specialist. A wide heavy stainless or cast-iron pan does the same job at a tenth of the price. Buy an uruli if you make payasam for a crowd, or because you want one beautiful object in your kitchen — a legitimate reason that needs no nutritional justification.
The cheena chatti
The deep, round-bottomed cast-iron pan that is Kerala's wok. High sides and a small hot base concentrate heat, so you can fry in a small volume of oil and still toss. Its name means "China vessel", and it carries the same cheena prefix as cheena pattu, Chinese silk. The Chinese lineage is an attribution, not an established fact: the etymology plainly records a perceived Chinese origin, but whether the vessel form actually arrived from China or the name was later applied to a locally evolved shape is unsettled — as is the popular claim that Zheng He's fleets brought the cantilevered fishing nets of Fort Kochi. The honest formulation is that Kerala's frying pan is named for China, and no one can prove why.
Verdict: buy one if you cook this food weekly. Season it like any cast iron and never let it sit wet.
The ammikkallu, and what the mixie actually costs you
The ammikkallu is a flat grinding stone with a roller; the aattukallu is the wet-grinder trough. The distinction between them and a motorised mixie is crushing versus cutting, and it is real rather than sentimental. A stone crushes cells and releases oils and starches gradually, at low temperature. A blade cuts, and at speed it heats the paste.
The consequences are describable. Stone-ground coconut paste is coarser and glossier, holds together instead of weeping oil, and does not begin to cook itself in the jar; the thenga aracha gravy it makes is thicker, rounder and less raw-tasting. Rice-and-urad batter ground on stone traps air differently and ferments better. A thenga aracha curry from an ammikkallu is a genuinely different dish, and this book says so rather than pretending the appliance is equivalent.
If you use a mixie, and almost everyone does: grind in short bursts, add ice-cold water a spoonful at a time, scrape down rather than running the motor longer, and stop the moment the paste warms to the touch. That gets you most of the way.
Verdict: skip the stone unless you have space, strength and inclination; a tabletop wet grinder is the useful middle option if you make batter weekly.
The manual coconut scraper (chirava)
If this book teaches one hand skill, this is it. A serrated bench-mounted blade or hand-cranked table scraper shreds the kernel into fine, long, wet flakes that release milk under pressure. A food processor chops the kernel into granules that hold on to their milk — which is why machine-processed coconut yields less milk, and thinner. Verdict: buy one if you buy whole coconuts. If you buy frozen grated coconut, which most diaspora readers should, you do not need it.
Appachatti, puttu kutti, sevanazhi
The appachatti is a small, deep, lidded pan whose curved sides give an appam its lacy edge and spongy centre; nothing else produces that shape, and there is no workaround worth the disappointment. The puttu kutti — originally a length of bamboo, now steel or aluminium — is why puttu survived the collapse of the traditional Kerala breakfast better than appam did: it is fast, and the vessel gives the dish its name and its shape. The sevanazhi, the idiyappam press with interchangeable discs, is the oldest tool in this chapter: the Kannada Lokopakara of 1025 CE documents both the preparation and the mould-press used for shavige, so the press in a Kerala kitchen today is a thousand-year-old documented instrument.
Verdict: buy the one that matches your breakfast. If you will make appam or puttu twice a week, the pan pays for itself in the first month; if you will make idiyappam twice a year, borrow a press.
Skip this
Anything sold as a "Kerala cookware set". They are assembled for gift shops.
A dosa tawa, if you already own a good flat cast-iron pan. The pan is the tawa.
Non-stick, mostly — with one honest exception. Non-stick is a real oil-reduction tool: a dosa, an omelette or a fish fillet that needs 15 g of oil in steel will take 5 g in a good non-stick pan, and at coconut oil's 892 kcal per 100 g that 10 g difference is about 89 kcal a serving. The limits are equally honest. Coatings degrade, and a scratched or flaking pan should be replaced rather than reasoned with; nor will non-stick take the high dry heat a proper ularthiyathu needs, so it cannot replace your heavy pan. Never preheat one empty, use wood or silicone only, wash by hand, and expect to replace it every 2–3 years.
Gadgets for one job: garlic presses, coconut-milk machines, electric choppers that hold half a shallot. The knife and the scraper are faster.
The single highest-return purchase in a fat-loss kitchen
Buy a digital scale that reads to 1 g, and put it on the counter where the oil bottle stands.
Here is the reasoning, and it is the mechanism of this whole book rather than an accessory to it. Two things decide whether a Kerala plate supports fat loss: portion and measured fat. Portion, because quantity of rice moved the risk in every large study while grain colour moved almost nothing. Fat, because oil is the densest thing in the kitchen by an enormous margin — a teaspoon of coconut oil at about 5 g carries roughly 45 kcal, and a tablespoon at about 14 g carries roughly 125 kcal. Neither of those quantities can be judged by eye, and both are written into every recipe you have ever cooked.
Now run the experiment, because it is more convincing than any argument. Set a bowl on the scale, zero it, and pour what you would normally call one tablespoon of oil into your pan — freehand, at your usual speed, the way you did it yesterday. Then weigh it. Most cooks, most of the time, pour well over the nominal amount; a "tablespoon" delivered from a bottle with a wide neck and a warm hand is routinely closer to two and a half teaspoons than to three, or considerably more than three, depending on the bottle. Whichever way yours falls, you now know your own error, and that is the point. A curry for four cooked with 20 g of oil rather than the 10 g the recipe intended carries about 89 extra kilocalories per portion, invisibly, at every meal, forever.
Weigh once, then calibrate the eye. You are not being asked to weigh food for the rest of your life. Do it deliberately for one week: weigh the oil into a teaspoon and look at what a real teaspoon looks like in your pan; weigh 200 g of cooked rice into the bowl you actually eat from and note where it comes up the side; weigh one portion of fish and one of thoran. After a week your hand and eye have new reference points and the scale can go back in the drawer for a month. Then bring it out and check yourself, because eyes drift — mine drift upward, by about a teaspoon of oil a fortnight. Measurement is not a discipline sustained by willpower; it is a calibration repeated occasionally, like tuning an instrument.
The measuring kit for this book
Measuring spoons, a proper set, metal, level-fillable — the flat handle matters, because you level a teaspoon of chilli powder against it.
A 250 ml cup, for cross-reference only. Every recipe here gives grams first and a cup or spoon equivalent in brackets, because volume is what Kerala kitchens use and grams are what make a recipe reproducible. The cup is there so the two systems agree.
An oil brush or a small spray bottle. A brush lays down 1–2 g of oil across a dosa tawa where a pour lays down 8 g. This single object is the most efficient fat reduction in the book, and it costs less than a kilogram of fish.
Two sets of containers, 200 ml and 300 ml, for portioning cooked rice. Cook the rice, portion it hot into containers, and the decision about quantity is made once, at the pot, instead of thirty times at the table. The sizes are deliberate: PURE measured rice intake in cooked grams, and one cup of cooked rice is about 150 g, so a 200 ml box holds roughly one modest portion and a 300 ml box roughly a generous one. Being able to see the difference is worth more than knowing it.
A probe thermometer, for the reader who fries. Oil below about 165°C (330°F) soaks into food instead of sealing it, so a cool pan is precisely how a fried snack ends up carrying twice the fat it needs to; oil above about 190°C (375°F) degrades faster and browns the outside before the inside cooks. If you are going to fry — and this book would rather you fried well four times a year than badly every week — spend the price of two banana chips packets on knowing your oil temperature.
The diaspora kitchen
What to carry back from Kerala in a suitcase: things that are dry, light and either unavailable or poor abroad. A chattuvam and a thavi, which weigh nothing. A chirava, if you will use it. A small meen chatti, wrapped in clothes and prayed over — it will probably survive, and if not, it is a cheap loss. A puttu kutti or a sevanazhi, awkward to source abroad and cheap at home. Kudampuli, feather-light and better bought where people argue about it. Rice is not worth the weight.
What to buy locally, without apology: frozen grated coconut, tinned coconut milk, matta rice, frozen drumstick and koorka, tamarind, curry leaves fresh or frozen, and a pressure cooker from whatever shop is nearest. All of it is now good, and much of it is better than the version your mother had in 1990.
What to stop worrying about: the uruli you do not own, the grinding stone you cannot lift up three flights of stairs, the bell metal you saw in a Fort Kochi shop window, and the idea that the food will not be right without them. It will. A heavy pan, a lidded pot, a pressure cooker, a wooden turner, a scale and a well-stocked pantry will cook every recipe in this book to the standard the recipe intends. The clay pot is a real improvement to one family of dishes. Everything else on the list is a pleasure, and pleasures are allowed to be optional.