R081Moru Curry
Tempered buttermilk curry with ground coconut
Recipes › Curries, Pulissery and the Sour Family
R085
Mango Curry
Mambazha pulissery — ripe mango in curd and coconut
Photograph: Adobe Stock · representative of the dish
The re-engineeringNo sugar or jaggery at all, where most versions add both to a fruit that is already 13.7 g of sugar per 100 g; the coconut held at 50 g for four; and the mango weighed at 400 g rather than "four mangoes", because mangoes vary threefold in size.
This is the sweet-sour register of the sadya at its clearest, and in Kerala it is the dish of the mango glut — the weeks in April and May when the trees drop more fruit than any household can eat and the curries turn yellow. Small, fibrous, intensely perfumed mangoes are the traditional choice, often cooked with the stone in and eaten with the fingers. It is a dish of a particular six weeks, and cooking it out of season with a shipped Kent mango is a pale imitation of a very good thing.
Before you start: Cook the mango and grind the paste before the curd is whisked. As with every dish in this family, once the curd is in the pan you have about three minutes and no room to hunt for anything.
Mango Curry
Active 15 minutes Total 30 minutes
Scale
4 servings
Ingredients — tap to tick off
- ✓400 g (about 3 small or 1½ large) ripe mango, peeled and in 2 cm pieces, stones reserved
- ✓150 ml water
- ✓1.5 g (¾ tsp) ground turmeric
- ✓8 g (about 1½) green chillies, slit
- ✓50 g (⅔ cup) freshly grated coconut
- ✓1.5 g (½ tsp) cumin seed
- ✓250 g (1 cup) thick curd, whisked smooth
- ✓2 g (⅓ tsp) M07 the 70:30 salt
- ✓5 g (1 tsp) coconut oil
- ✓1.5 g (⅓ tsp) mustard seed
- ✓0.5 g (⅛ tsp) fenugreek seed
- ✓2 dried red chillies, broken
- ✓3 g (1 sprig) curry leaves
Allergens: Milk, mustard.
Equipment: Heavy 2-litre pan; mixie; small pan for the tempering. Substitute: as R081.
Per serving (estimated)
| Energy | 168 kcal |
| Protein | 3.8 g |
| Fibre | 3.3 g |
| Net carbohydrate | 18.9 g |
| Total carbohydrate | 22.2 g |
| Sugars | 17.4 g |
| Fat | 9.1 g |
| Saturated fat | 7.0 g |
| Sodium | 170 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
- Simmer the mango pieces and the reserved stones with the water, turmeric, green chilli and a pinch of the salt in the covered pan over a medium flame, , until the fruit is soft enough to crush against the side of the pan with a spoon but not yet a purée. Very ripe fruit may need only five.
- Crush about a third of the fruit against the pan with the back of the spoon and leave the rest in pieces. This gives the curry body and keeps its texture at the same time.
- Grind the coconut and cumin with 60 ml water to a fine paste, in bursts, until no grit remains on a fingertip.
- Stir the paste in and cook uncovered on a low flame , until the raw coconut smell has lifted. Take the pan off the heat and let it stand .
- Whisk the curd smooth and stir it in off the heat with the rest of the salt.
- Return to the very lowest flame and warm, stirring continuously, until hot to a fingertip and faintly steaming, . Not one bubble. The sugar in ripe mango makes the base of the pan run hotter than you expect, so keep the spoon moving and lift it off early.
- Temper as in R081 and pour the tempering over the surface without stirring. Serve warm or at room temperature, and leave the stones in for anyone who wants them.
Why this worksRipe mango brings both acid and sugar, so the dish is balanced before any seasoning is added — which is precisely why it needs no jaggery. The curd's lactic acid then sits at a different point on the tongue from the fruit's citric and malic acids, and the two together read as far more complex than either alone. This is the sadya's sweet-sour course working exactly as designed.
Sourcing note
Look for small, fibrous, very fragrant mangoes — chandrakaran, moovandan, kilichundan in Kerala; Indian totapuri or Pakistani chaunsa seconds elsewhere; the Mexican ataulfo or champagne mango is a good and widely available stand-in. What you want is perfume and acidity, not the bland sweetness of a large Kent or Tommy Atkins. Do not use tinned mango pulp, which is heavily sweetened and turns this into a dessert. If only unripe mango is available, that is a different and also excellent dish — cook it 12–15 minutes, add 6 g of jaggery, and you have manga curry rather than mambazha pulissery.
If you are watching…
Blood sugar: 17.4 g of sugars a portion is the highest figure in this chapter and you should know it before you cook. All but about 3 g of it is the mango's own fructose, glucose and sucrose. There is no honest way to make ripe-mango pulissery a low-sugar dish; what you can do is treat it as one item on a plate rather than a bowlful, keep the rice at the quarter-plate, and choose the unripe-mango version in the SWAP IT below when your numbers are running high. A whole ripe mango eaten out of hand is much the same arithmetic and nobody worries about it.
Blood pressure: 170 mg a portion, and this is a dish where the fruit acid genuinely replaces salt. It will taste fully seasoned with the M07 left out, at about 100 mg.
Cholesterol: 7.0 g of saturated fat a portion from 50 g of grated coconut and a teaspoon of oil for four. Cut the coconut to 30 g for about 5.2 g; the curry is thinner and the mango carries it well enough.
Swap it
Ripe mango → 400 g unripe green mango, cooked 12–15 minutes with 6 g jaggery. Sugars drop from 17.4 g to about 7 g a portion and the dish becomes sharper and more assertive. This is the version to cook if glucose is the concern.
Ripe mango → 300 g pineapple, which gives R082. Sugars fall to about 13 g a portion.
Curd → 250 g coconut yoghurt for a dairy-free version. Splits less readily; saturated fat rises by about 1.5 g a portion.
Add 100 g cooked vanpayar at step 5 → protein up about 4 g, fibre up about 2 g, and the plate carries its pulse. Traditional in some Palakkad households and better than it sounds.
Make ahead · store · freeze
The cooked mango base with the coconut paste keeps 2 days in the fridge; add the curd on the day. Fridge 2 days for the finished curry, covered, non-metal. Do not freeze; the curd splits and the mango goes stringy. Reheat to barely warm over the lowest flame, or serve cold, which in a Kerala April is what most people do.
Leftovers
Blend it smooth, chill it hard, and drink it as a savoury mango sambharam. Or spoon it over R021 in place of the milk, which is a genuinely good breakfast.
Troubleshooting
Split: it boiled, and ripe mango makes the pan base run hot. Lowest flame, constant stirring, off early.
Purée rather than curry: the mango was overripe or overcooked. Six minutes, and crush only a third of it.
Cloying: add a teaspoon of lime juice off the heat, or three or four crushed black peppercorns. Acid and pungency are the correctives for sweetness; more salt is not.
Stringy and fibrous: the cultivar. Small Kerala mangoes are fibrous by nature and the fibres are traditionally sucked off the stone rather than strained out.
Serve with
R015 Matta Rice, Properly Cooked · R086 Rasam · R084 Ulli Theeyal · a thoran or mezhukkupuratti from Chapter 21
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