R063Cabbage Thoran
The master thoran: shredded cabbage, crushed coconut, turmeric
Recipes › Vegetables: The Half of the Plate
R077
Koorka Mezhukkupuratti
Chinese potato, scrubbed, boiled and glazed with pepper
Photograph: Adobe Stock · representative of the dish
The re-engineeringFifteen grams of oil where a koorka mezhukkupuratti is usually made with 40–45 g and often deep-fried outright. The tubers are boiled first and then glazed, which buys most of the texture back. What is lost is the crisp shell of a fried koorka, and there is no technique in this book that recovers it.
Koorka is the winter tuber of the Kerala backyard, and it belongs to the one day in the calendar when the tubers take the centre of the leaf: Thiruvathira, a rice-free women's festival whose main dish, puzhukku, is colocasia, yam, koorka, sweet potato and raw plantain bound in ground coconut. Koorka has a nutty, faintly earthy flavour that no other tuber has, and its reputation is entirely deserved. Its reputation for being maddening to peel is also deserved.
Before you start: Clean the koorka the night before if you can. It is twenty minutes of work and it is the reason people stop making this dish.
Koorka Mezhukkupuratti
Active — Total —
Scale
4 servings
Ingredients — tap to tick off
- ✓500 g (about 30) koorka (Chinese potato), cleaned and larger ones halved
- ✓1.5 g (¼ tsp) ground turmeric
- ✓2.5 g (scant ½ tsp) salt, or M07
- ✓15 g (1 tbsp) coconut oil
- ✓50 g (about 5) 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; wide heavy pan, 28 cm; a rough cloth or a clean coir scrubber for the tubers. Substitute for the traditional method of shaking koorka in a sack with coarse sand: put the tubers in a lidded container with 2 tablespoons of coarse salt and shake hard for 2 minutes, then rinse. It removes most of the skin and is the single most useful trick in this recipe.
Per serving (estimated)
| Energy | 147 kcal |
| Protein | 3.3 g |
| Fibre | 6.0 g |
| Net carbohydrate | 24.3 g |
| Total carbohydrate | 30.3 g |
| Sugars | 1.7 g |
| Fat | 4.1 g |
| Saturated fat | 3.2 g |
| Sodium | 260 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
- Clean the tubers by the salt-shaking method above, or scrub them with a rough cloth. Do not peel with a knife; you will lose half the vegetable. A little skin left on is correct and traditional.
- Boil in salted water with the turmeric until a tuber can be pierced with a skewer but still resists at the centre, depending on size. Drain and leave in the colander to steam dry.
- Heat the wide pan , add the oil, swirl to a film, add the shallots and cook until soft with coloured edges, .
- Add the chilli powder and pepper and stir 20–30 seconds until the powders darken by a shade.
- Add the drained koorka in a single layer and leave undisturbed , then turn and repeat until the tubers are patched with golden brown, glossy, and dry to the touch, in total. Press a few gently with the back of the spoon so they split slightly and take up more of the masala.
- Add the curry leaves for the last minute, correct the salt off the heat, and serve hot.
Why this worksBoiling first gelatinises the starch and drives off the surface water that would otherwise absorb oil, so the pan's job becomes browning rather than cooking. Splitting a few tubers at the end increases the surface the masala can cling to without adding fat, which is the cheapest flavour available in a dish made with a tablespoon of oil.
Sourcing note
This is the hardest ingredient in the chapter to buy outside Kerala. Koorka (Plectranthus rotundifolius, Chinese potato, Hausa potato, coleus) turns up frozen in Kerala-focused Indian groceries in the Gulf, the UK and North America, usually already cleaned, which removes the only real obstacle to making it — buy it whenever you see it. Fresh, it appears in Indian shops from December to February. Where there is none: small new potatoes are the honest substitute and are not the same thing, since koorka is nuttier and drier; Jerusalem artichokes are closer in flavour and much less waxy; and arbi (taro corms) are closer in texture. Say which you used and adjust the boil by two or three minutes either way.
If you are watching…
Blood sugar: 24.3 g net carbohydrate per serving, computed as yam. Like chena mezhukkupuratti, this is a starch dish and belongs in the grain quarter of the plate. On Thiruvathira, when there is no rice at all, that is exactly the point of it.
Blood pressure: 260 mg sodium, or about 195 mg with M07. Note that the boiling water is salted and discarded, and only the 2.5 g that seasons the finished dish is counted.
Cholesterol: 3.2 g saturated fat per serving, and about 0.9 g made with groundnut or sesame oil.
Swap it
Koorka → small new potatoes, Jerusalem artichokes or taro corms. See the sourcing note. Potatoes are waxier and blander; Jerusalem artichokes are closer in flavour and will not hold their shape as well.
Coconut oil → groundnut, sesame or rice bran oil. Saturated fat falls to about 0.9 g per serving, and this dish loses little by it. (Allergen: this swap introduces peanuts, sesame.)
Add 40 g grated coconut in the last minute → a hybrid koorka thoran, which many households make and which is very good.
Deep-fried version → this exists, it is delicious, and it uses 250 ml of oil. Chapter 14's table is honest about which reductions are real; this is one of the two or three in the book that cannot be made honestly. Have it occasionally, as itself.
Make ahead · store · freeze
Clean and boil up to 1 day ahead; drier tubers glaze better, so this improves the dish. Fridge 3 days. Freeze 2 months cleaned and boiled but not glazed. Reheat in a dry pan 3–4 minutes.
Leftovers
Crush cold koorka roughly and fold into a puzhukku with ground coconut, or mash with green chilli and shallot and fry as small cakes in 5 g of oil.
Troubleshooting
Half the vegetable went in the bin: peeled with a knife. Use the salt-shake method.
Falling apart in the pan: boiled too long. Ten minutes, then test every two.
Gritty: koorka grows in sandy soil and holds it in the folds. Wash in three changes of water after scrubbing.
Serve with
R015 Matta Rice · R024 Meen Vevichathu · R065 Cheera Thoran · R081 Moru Curry
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