R001Palappam
The lace-edged fermented appam, the Syrian Christian breakfast bread
Photograph: Adobe Stock · representative of the dish
The re-engineeringOil cut from four tablespoons to two teaspoons across four servings, and the body of the dish now comes from 500 g of shallots reduced slowly until they are jammy. This is technique 8 from Chapter 14 doing the work that fat used to do, and it is the one swap in this book that costs almost nothing in flavour.
Egg roast is the dish that shows what onion reduction can do. A restaurant version is glossy because it is swimming in oil; a good household version is glossy because 500 g of shallots have been cooked down to a fraction of their volume and their sugars have caramelised. The second is better food and better cooking. It is also the fastest protein in this chapter — 16 g a serving, on the table in half an hour — and the natural partner for appam, idiyappam and wheat puttu across Kerala, from Syrian Christian Easter breakfasts to Malabar tea shops.
Before you start: Slice all the shallots before the flame goes on. Five hundred grams takes 12–15 minutes to slice and the pan will not wait. If you have M15 in the freezer, 6 cubes replace steps 1 to 4 and the dish takes 15 minutes.
Egg Roast, Rebuilt
Active 30 minutes Total 40 minutes
Scale
4 servings
Ingredients — tap to tick off
- ✓8 eggs, medium
- ✓10 g (2 tsp) coconut oil
- ✓500 g (about 50) shallots, thinly sliced
- ✓15 g (a 3 cm piece) ginger, finely chopped
- ✓10 g (about 3 cloves) garlic, finely chopped
- ✓10 g (2) green chillies, slit
- ✓1 sprig curry leaves
- ✓6 g (1 tbsp) ground coriander
- ✓3 g (½ tsp) Kashmiri chilli powder
- ✓2 g (⅓ tsp) ground turmeric
- ✓1 g (¼ tsp) ground black pepper
- ✓200 g (2) tomatoes, chopped
- ✓4 g (¾ tsp) M07 salt or plain salt
- ✓1 g (½ tsp) M01 Kerala garam masala, to finish
- ✓a few coriander leaves
Allergens: Egg.
Equipment: Wide heavy pan, 26 cm, with a lid. Substitute: any deep frying pan with a lid; a narrow pan steams the shallots instead of reducing them and adds 10 minutes.
Per serving (estimated)
| Energy | 240 kcal |
| Protein | 16 g |
| Fibre | 4 g |
| Net carbohydrate | 13 g |
| Total carbohydrate | 17 g |
| Sugars | 13 g |
| Fat | 14 g |
| Saturated fat | 6 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
- Boil the eggs from cold: bring to the boil, cook for firm yolks, then cool them under running water and peel. Score each egg 3 or 4 times through the white with a knife tip, no more than 2 mm deep, so the masala gets inside.
- Heat the coconut oil in the wide pan and swirl it to a film. Add the shallots all at once with a pinch of the salt, cover, and cook on a low flame, stirring every , until they have collapsed, given up their water and turned the colour of weak tea, . A higher flame browns the surfaces while the insides steam, and the dish never recovers from it.
- Uncover and continue on a low flame, stirring more often, until the water has gone and the mass is jammy, glossy and one shade darker, .
- Add the ginger, garlic, green chillies and curry leaves and cook until the raw garlic smell has lifted and the pan smells sweet, .
- Add the coriander, chilli, turmeric and pepper and cook, stirring constantly, until the powders darken by a shade and the dusty raw smell has gone, . A splash of water if anything catches.
- Add the tomatoes and the rest of the salt and cook until they have broken down completely and a thin rim of oil appears at the edge of the mass, . That rim is the cue that the water has gone.
- Fold in the eggs, cut side down, and turn them gently in the masala until they are coated and heated through, . Do not stir hard; the whites tear.
- Finish off the heat with the garam masala and the coriander leaves, and stand before serving.
Why this worksSlowly reduced shallots lose water gradually, so their sugars concentrate and caramelise instead of the surfaces browning while the interiors steam, and their cell walls break down into a purée that thickens by suspension. That is what makes a low-oil egg roast glossy. Frying the ground spices at step 5 hydrates them and drives their fat-soluble aromatics into what little oil there is.
Sourcing note
Shallots are not interchangeable with onions here, and this is the dish that proves it: they are sweeter, denser and lower in water, so they reduce to a jam rather than a purée. Look for "Madras onions", "sambar onions", "pearl onions" or small red onions; French shallots are a good second. Where shallots are expensive, use 350 g shallots and 200 g red onion rather than going all-onion, and expect a wetter base that needs 5 minutes longer. Frozen pre-peeled shallots save half the active time and are a legitimate shortcut.
If you are watching…
Blood sugar: 13 g of net carbohydrate and 16 g of protein makes this the lowest-glycaemic-load dish in the chapter and the best thing to put beside a large grain portion. Pairing protein and fat with a starch slows the meal; the specific effect for rice has not been measured in a trial this book can cite, so it is offered as a principle rather than a number.
Blood pressure: 280 mg a serving with M07 and about 400 mg with plain salt.
Cholesterol: 6 g of saturated fat a serving, of which about 3.5 g is the eggs and 2 g the coconut oil. Sesame or groundnut oil instead of coconut takes the oil's contribution to about 0.3 g, at some loss of Kerala character in a dish where the oil is genuinely tasteable. Dietary cholesterol from eggs is a separate question from saturated fat and one for your doctor, not for this page.
Swap it
6 cubes of M15 for steps 1 to 4 → 15 minutes instead of 40, at the cost of the fresher shallot note you get from cooking them down today. The best weeknight version.
Sesame or groundnut oil for coconut oil → saturated fat falls from 6 g to about 4.2 g a serving, and the dish loses a distinctly Kerala aroma. This is one of the dishes where coconut oil genuinely is the flavour, so make the swap deliberately rather than by default. (Allergen: this swap introduces peanuts, sesame.)
Boiled egg whites only, 12 of them → protein rises to about 18 g a serving, fat falls to about 4 g, and the dish loses the yolk's richness, which was carrying the masala. A real trade, not a free one.
400 g mushrooms or 300 g cubed paneer for the eggs → a vegetarian roast on the same base. Mushrooms need the water cooked off hard before the masala goes on. (Allergen: this swap introduces milk.)
Scale it
At 1 kg of shallots use two pans, or add 10 minutes to steps 2 and 3. Oil does not scale linearly; a wider pan needs proportionally less.
Make ahead · store · freeze
The masala base is better made ahead and keeps fridge 4 days or freezes 3 months without the eggs. Assembled egg roast keeps fridge 2 days. Do not freeze it with the eggs in — boiled egg white turns rubbery and weeps on thawing. Reheat gently with a splash of water, 4–5 minutes, turning the eggs rather than stirring.
Leftovers
Chop the eggs and masala together coarsely and use them as a filling for a rolled dosa or between two pathiris. Cold egg roast on toast is not traditional and is very good.
Troubleshooting
Sharp and oniony rather than sweet: step 2 was rushed on too high a flame. Nothing fixes it afterwards but longer cooking.
Watery masala that will not coat the eggs: the tomatoes were not cooked down to the oil-rim stage at step 6.
Eggs torn and ragged: stirred rather than turned, or scored too deeply.
Burnt, bitter edge: the powders caught at step 5. Add a splash of water with them next time.
Serve with
R001 Palappam — the Syrian Christian pairing · R005 Idiyappam · R004 Wheat and Coconut Puttu · R011 Cherupayar Curry to complete the plate with a pulse
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