R063Cabbage Thoran
The master thoran: shredded cabbage, crushed coconut, turmeric
Recipes › Vegetables: The Half of the Plate
R073
Chena Mezhukkupuratti
Elephant foot yam, parboiled then smeared with oil until it catches
Photograph: Adobe Stock · representative of the dish
The re-engineeringFifteen grams of oil where this dish is usually made with 40–45 g, and the reduction is bought entirely by technique: the yam is parboiled first, so the oil is doing three minutes of glazing rather than fifteen minutes of frying. Say plainly what is lost — a deep-fried chena has crisp edges that this version does not reach. What it keeps is the glaze, the pepper and the shallot, which is most of the pleasure.
Mezhukku means oil or wax; puratti means smeared. The name is the recipe, and it is the best example in Malayalam of a dish named for its technique rather than its contents. That makes it the most exposed dish in this book: there is nowhere for a heavy hand with the oil to hide, and nowhere for a light hand either. Fifteen grams across four servings is under a teaspoon each, and the way you spend it is the whole craft.
Before you start: Rub a little oil on your hands or wear gloves before peeling chena. The raw tuber carries calcium oxalate crystals that irritate skin for an hour; cooking destroys them entirely.
Chena Mezhukkupuratti
Active 20 minutes Total 40 minutes
Scale
4 servings
Ingredients — tap to tick off
- ✓550 g (about 3¾ cups, cut) elephant foot yam (chena), peeled and cut into 2 cm × 1 cm batons
- ✓2 g (⅓ tsp) ground turmeric
- ✓2.5 g (scant ½ tsp) salt, or M07
- ✓15 g (1 tbsp) coconut oil
- ✓60 g (about 6) shallots, thinly sliced
- ✓3 g (½ tsp) Kashmiri chilli powder
- ✓2 g (¾ tsp) coarsely crushed black pepper
- ✓3 g (2 sprigs) curry leaves
Allergens: None of the major allergens.
Equipment: Saucepan for parboiling; the widest heavy pan you own, 28 cm if possible. Substitute: a non-stick pan is legitimate here and saves 5 g of oil. This is one of the few places in the book where non-stick earns its keep.
Per serving (estimated)
| Energy | 160 kcal |
| Protein | 4.1 g |
| Fibre | 6.8 g |
| Net carbohydrate | 26.6 g |
| Total carbohydrate | 33.4 g |
| Sugars | 2.0 g |
| Fat | 4.1 g |
| Saturated fat | 3.2 g |
| Sodium | 270 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
- Parboil the chena with the turmeric and salt in water to just cover, uncovered, until a piece can be pierced with a fingernail but holds firm at the centre, . Drain thoroughly and leave in the colander to steam dry. Wet yam will not glaze, and this five minutes is the difference between a good and a mediocre dish.
- Heat the wide pan for , add the oil, and swirl it to a film across the whole base. Add the shallots and cook until soft and the edges have coloured, .
- Add the chilli powder and pepper and stir for 20–30 seconds, until the powder darkens by a shade and the raw dusty smell goes.
- Add the drained chena in a single layer and leave it alone for . This is the step people ruin by stirring. It needs contact with the pan to colour.
- Turn the pieces and repeat, twice, until the batons are golden-brown in patches, glossy, and dry to the touch rather than wet, in total. Add the curry leaves for the last minute.
- Taste and correct the salt off the heat. Serve hot; a mezhukkupuratti loses its glaze as it cools.
Why this worksParboiling gelatinises the yam's starch and drives off surface water, so the oil in the pan is available to conduct heat and brown the surface rather than being absorbed by a raw, thirsty vegetable. Food fried from raw at low temperature takes up several times more oil than the same food browned dry after par-cooking, which is why this version needs a third of the traditional quantity.
Sourcing note
Chena is stocked by Indian groceries as elephant foot yam or suran, and by many Asian groceries simply as yam; frozen cubes are convenient and need no thawing, though they arrive softer, so cut the parboil to 4 minutes. In a Western supermarket with none of this, the substitution ladder runs: taro, then celeriac, then a waxy potato. Celeriac is the underrated answer — it holds its shape, browns well and is drier than potato, and nobody expects it to work. Sweet potato does not work: it is too sweet and too soft, and it will not glaze.
If you are watching…
Blood sugar: 26.6 g net carbohydrate per serving, which is the highest figure in this chapter and the most important thing to notice about this dish. Chena is a starch. A 130 g serving of this is roughly the carbohydrate of 100 g of cooked rice, so it belongs in the quarter of the plate that holds the grain — and if you serve it, serve less rice. It is not a vegetable side, whatever it looks like.
Blood pressure: 270 mg sodium, or about 200 mg with M07.
Cholesterol: 3.2 g saturated fat per serving, which is a third of what an olan carries and among the lowest in this chapter. Made with groundnut or sesame oil instead it falls to about 0.9 g, and it is still a good dish, because here the oil is a medium rather than a flavour.
Swap it
Chena → taro, celeriac or waxy potato. See the sourcing note. Potato browns fastest and softens most.
Chena → 550 g raw green plantain, cut the same way. This is ethakka mezhukkupuratti, equally traditional, faster to cook by 3 minutes, and slightly lower in protein.
Coconut oil → groundnut, sesame or rice bran oil. Saturated fat falls to about 0.9 g per serving. Do make this swap here; the oil is not the flavour in a mezhukkupuratti the way it is in a thoran. (Allergen: this swap introduces peanuts, sesame.)
Add 3 g crushed garlic with the shallots → rounder and more savoury, and no longer sadya-appropriate.
Scale it
Above four servings, use two pans. A crowded pan steams, and a steamed mezhukkupuratti is a boiled yam with pepper on it.
Make ahead · store · freeze
Parboil up to 1 day ahead and refrigerate; the drier the yam, the better it glazes, so this is an improvement rather than a compromise. Fridge 3 days. Freeze 1 month after parboiling but before frying, which works well; freezing the finished dish does not. Reheat in a dry pan, 3–4 minutes, not a microwave.
Leftovers
Crush cold chena mezhukkupuratti roughly with a fork, bind with 1 beaten egg and 15 g of rice flour, and shallow-fry as cakes. Or fold it into a kappa puzhukku.
Troubleshooting
Pieces broke into mash: parboiled too long. Six minutes, then test every minute.
No colour after 12 minutes: the pan was too crowded or too cool, or the yam was still wet. Raise the flame and work in two batches.
Itchy hands: raw chena oxalate. It passes within an hour; a rub with lime helps, and gloves next time help more.
Serve with
R024 Meen Vevichathu · R063 Cabbage Thoran · R081 Moru Curry · R107 Sambharam
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