R001Palappam
The lace-edged fermented appam, the Syrian Christian breakfast bread
Photograph: Adobe Stock · representative of the dish
Plan ahead: plus 8–12 hours soaking — required.
The re-engineeringThe roasted coconut comes from a frozen M09 portion instead of fifteen minutes of stirring, which is the only reason this dish can happen on a Wednesday. The coconut itself is held at 15 g a serving, and the dark cooking liquid from the chickpeas is kept and used as the gravy rather than poured down the sink.
This is the most important recipe in the chapter, and it has nothing to do with the chickpeas being fashionable. It is the protein and the fibre that make every other page here work. Black chickpeas — kadala, kala chana — carry 25.22 g of fibre per 100 g, the highest of any pulse in the Kerala repertoire by a wide margin, and 18.77 g of protein. One serving of this curry is 13 g of protein and 19 g of fibre. Put it beside R002 and you have the breakfast this whole book is arguing for.
Before you start: The chickpeas must be soaked overnight. There is no shortcut worth taking — unsoaked kadala needs 45 minutes under pressure and comes out with a chalky centre.
Kadala Curry
Active 25 minutes Total 45 minutes
Scale
4 servings
Ingredients — tap to tick off
- ✓240 g (1¼ cups) dried black chickpeas (kadala), soaked 8–12 hours in plenty of water
- ✓700 ml water, for cooking
- ✓3 cubes (150 g) M15 base shallot masala, from frozen
- ✓2 portions (60 g) M09 varutharacha thenga, from frozen
- ✓8 g (1½ tsp) ground coriander
- ✓3 g (½ tsp) Kashmiri chilli powder
- ✓2 g (⅓ tsp) ground turmeric
- ✓4 g (¾ tsp) M07 salt or plain salt
- ✓5 g (1 tsp) coconut oil
- ✓5 g (1 tsp) black mustard seed
- ✓30 g (about 3) shallots, thinly sliced
- ✓1 sprig curry leaves
Allergens: Mustard.
Equipment: Pressure cooker, 3 litres or larger. Substitute: a heavy lidded pan, at a cost of 60–90 minutes of simmering and about 400 ml more water. A slow cooker on high for 4–5 hours also works and needs no watching.
Per serving (estimated)
| Energy | 205 kcal |
| Protein | 13 g |
| Fibre | 19 g |
| Net carbohydrate | 13 g |
| Total carbohydrate | 32 g |
| Sugars | 7 g |
| Fat | 11 g |
| Saturated fat | 7 g |
| Sodium | 280 mg |
From ICMR-NIN IFCT 2017 and USDA FoodData Central. Per-serving figures stay the same when you scale.
Method — tap a step to mark it done, tap a time to start a timer
- Drain the soaked chickpeas and pressure-cook them with the 700 ml water and the turmeric until completely tender — a chickpea should crush between finger and thumb with no resistance and no chalky core, at full pressure, or in a covered pan. Keep every drop of the cooking liquid.
- Heat the M15 cubes in a wide pan over a medium flame with a splash of water until they melt down and begin to smell cooked, from frozen.
- Add the coriander and chilli powder and cook, stirring constantly, until the powders darken by a shade and the raw dusty smell has gone, . Add a spoonful of the chickpea liquid if anything catches.
- Stir in the M09 roasted coconut paste and let it break down into the base, . It will thicken and darken the pan visibly.
- Add the chickpeas with all their liquid and the salt. Bring to a simmer and cook uncovered until the gravy has thickened enough to coat the back of a spoon and a few chickpeas have begun to break down at the edges, . Crush a spoonful of chickpeas against the side of the pan to thicken it further.
- Temper in a small pan: heat the coconut oil until a mustard seed dropped in cracks at once, add the rest of the mustard and wait for them to finish popping, 20–30 seconds, then the sliced shallots until golden at the edges, , then the curry leaves, which will spit and crisp in about 10 seconds.
- Pour the tempering over the curry, stir once, and take it off the heat. Let it stand before serving; the gravy tightens and the flavours settle.
Why this worksRoasted coconut thickens this gravy as a suspension of insoluble particles rather than as an emulsion, which is why it reheats without splitting and brings 2 g of fibre a serving with it. The chickpea cooking water is not waste: it carries leached starch and soluble fibre that give the curry its body without any added fat. Crushing a few chickpeas exploits the same effect.
Sourcing note
Ask for kadala, kala chana or black chickpeas in any South Asian grocery; Middle Eastern and African shops carry them too. They are small, dark and wrinkled, and they are not interchangeable with the large pale chickpea, which cooks softer, tastes blander and carries about 15 g of fibre per 100 g rather than 25. Tinned brown chickpeas are a legitimate Tuesday shortcut at 480 g drained, rinsed well because the brine is where the sodium is — but you lose the dark cooking liquid, which is where the colour and much of the flavour live. Make up the gravy with 400 ml water and a little extra M09.
If you are watching…
Blood sugar: this is the dish the chapter is built around. Brown rice with 50 g of legumes a day lowered five-day glycaemic iAUC by 22.9% against white rice in overweight Asian Indians, against 19.8% for the brown-rice swap alone (Mohan et al., 2014) — 15 participants over five days, so a mechanism demonstration rather than an outcome trial, and the direction is what matters. One serving here is well over 50 g of cooked pulse.
Blood pressure: 280 mg a serving against a 2,000 mg daily target, and pulses at about 130 g a day lowered systolic pressure by 4.5 mmHg as part of a low-glycaemic diet in a three-month trial of 121 adults with type 2 diabetes (Jenkins et al., 2012).
Cholesterol: 7 g of saturated fat, almost all of it the roasted coconut. Pulses at a median 130 g a day lowered LDL cholesterol by 0.17 mmol/L across 26 trials (Ha et al., 2014), so this dish is working in both directions at once. The swap below cuts the saturated fat by half if that is your priority.
Swap it
One M09 portion instead of two, made up with 40 g roasted chana dal ground with water → saturated fat falls from 7 g to about 4 g a serving with much the same thickening, at a real cost in aroma. The most useful swap on this page.
Vanpayar or muthira for the kadala → both work in the same method. Vanpayar cooks faster and carries 11.54 g of fibre per 100 g; muthira is the leanest pulse in the repertoire at 0.62 g of fat and needs an overnight soak and a longer cook.
No M09 at all, and 120 ml of second-extraction coconut milk stirred in off the heat → a paler, milder curry, closer to a Malabar kadala. Saturated fat is similar; the depth is not.
No M15 → build the base fresh with 150 g sliced shallots, 100 g tomato and 5 g oil, and add 25 minutes to the active time.
Scale it
At eight servings, pressure-cook in two batches or use a 6-litre cooker no more than two-thirds full.
Make ahead · store · freeze
Better on day two, unambiguously — the gravy thickens and the chickpeas absorb it. Fridge 4 days in a covered container. Freeze 3 months in portions; the texture holds up completely, which makes this the best freezer dish in the chapter. Reheat gently with a splash of water, 5–6 minutes, or from frozen in a covered pan 10–12 minutes.
Leftovers
Drain the chickpeas from the gravy, crush them coarsely with grated coconut and a green chilli, and fry for 4–5 minutes for a kadala thoran. Or thin the whole thing with water and eat it as a soup with a squeeze of lime, which is better than it sounds.
Troubleshooting
Chickpeas still hard after pressure-cooking: old stock, or too little soaking. Give them another 8–10 minutes under pressure; salt added at step 1 also slows softening, which is why it goes in at step 5.
Thin, watery gravy: not reduced long enough, or the cooking liquid was discarded. Crush a spoonful of chickpeas against the pan and simmer 5 minutes more.
Bitter, ashy taste: the M09 was roasted past dark toast. Nothing buries it.
Gravy tastes flat: the powders were not fried at step 3, or it needed the 10-minute stand at the end.
Serve with
R002 Puttu, Matta Rice — the classic pairing and the point of both recipes · R001 Palappam · R005 Idiyappam · R006 Idli · R015 Matta Rice
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