R089Kerala Kitchen Salad
Raw vegetables the way a Kerala kitchen cuts them
Recipes › Salads, Pachadis, Chutneys, Podis and Pickles
R091
Cucumber Pachadi
Vellarikka in curd, the sadya version
Photograph: Adobe Stock · representative of the dish
The re-engineeringThe cucumber goes in raw rather than boiled, and the coconut drops to 50 g across six servings. Raw cucumber holds its water in its cells rather than releasing it into the dish, so less coconut is needed to give body and the pachadi is crisper for it.
On the sadya leaf this sits between the kichadi and the pulissery, and the difference between a good one and a dull one is entirely about water. Salt the cucumber and it weeps; boil it and it collapses; leave it raw, cut small, and fold it into a properly thick coconut-and-mustard paste, and every spoonful has a little snap in it. Kerala grows a pale, fat, thin-skinned cucumber for exactly this. Any cucumber will do the job.
Before you start: Dice the cucumber last, and do not salt it until the curd is already in. Salted cucumber loses noticeable water in 8–10 minutes.
Cucumber Pachadi
Active 20 minutes Total 25 minutes
Scale
6 servings
Ingredients — tap to tick off
- ✓50 g (½ cup) fresh grated coconut
- ✓10 g (about 2) green chillies
- ✓3 g (½ tsp) mustard seed, for the paste
- ✓350 g (1 large) cucumber, peeled, seeded and cut into 5 mm dice
- ✓250 g (1 cup) plain curd, whisked smooth
- ✓2.5 g (scant ½ tsp) salt
- ✓For the tempering: 5 g (1 tsp) coconut oil · 4 g (¾ tsp) mustard seed · 3 g (about 2) dried red chillies, broken · 3 g (about 10 leaves) curry leaves
Allergens: Milk, mustard.
Equipment: Mixie or small blender; small tempering pan. Substitute: a mortar, which gives a coarser paste that suits this dish better than a smooth one.
Per serving (estimated)
| Energy | 83 kcal |
| Protein | 3 g |
| Fibre | 3 g |
| Net carbohydrate | 5 g |
| Total carbohydrate | 8 g |
| Sugars | 4 g |
| Fat | 6 g |
| Saturated fat | 5 g |
| Sodium | 190 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
- Grind the coconut, green chilli and the 3 g of mustard seed with 3 tablespoons of water to a thick, deliberately coarse paste, 60–90 seconds. Stop while you can still feel coconut grains between your fingers.
- Peel the cucumber, halve it lengthways, scrape out the seed core with a teaspoon, and dice the flesh to 5 mm.
- Whisk the curd with the coconut paste until it is a single pale-green cream with no streaks, 30–45 seconds.
- Fold in the cucumber and the salt, and taste at once. If it needs lifting, add 5 ml of lime juice rather than more salt.
- Temper: heat the coconut oil, add the mustard seed and wait for it to pop steadily, 30–45 seconds; add the dried chilli and curry leaf and take the pan off the heat as soon as the leaves crackle and go glassy, 5–10 seconds. Pour over and fold through once, no more.
- Rest and serve. Beyond about the cucumber begins to release water and the dish loosens.
Why this worksRaw cucumber is roughly 95% water held inside intact cells. Leave the cells intact and that water stays put, so the pachadi keeps its texture and needs less coconut to thicken it. The ground raw mustard supplies pungency without sodium, and the curd supplies both acid and live culture — the item with the most consistent inverse associations across weight, blood pressure and diabetes in the dairy cohorts.
Sourcing note
The Kerala vellarikka is a large pale cucumber with soft seeds and a mild flesh; the closest thing abroad is a peeled and seeded English cucumber, or a peeled Armenian cucumber. Avoid the small pickling cucumbers, which are too dense and too bitter at the stem. Use plain whole-milk yoghurt rather than Greek, or thin Greek yoghurt with 40 ml of water.
If you are watching…
Blood pressure: 190 mg per serving, about 120 mg of which is the curd itself. This is one of the better dishes on the leaf for a reader counting sodium, and it can drop to about 130 mg by halving the added salt and adding lime.
Blood sugar: 5 g of net carbohydrate for 110 g of food. Serve it in quantity beside rice; it is the cheapest volume on the plate.
Cholesterol: 5 g of saturated fat per serving. Low-fat curd brings it to about 3.5 g.
Swap it
Ash gourd (kumbalanga) for cucumber, lightly cooked → Consequence: this is a kichadi rather than a pachadi, softer and milder, and it keeps a day longer.
Low-fat curd → saturated fat 5 g down to 3.5 g. Consequence: looser; add 10 g more ground coconut.
No fresh coconut → 25 g desiccated coconut soaked in 50 ml warm water for 10 minutes. Consequence: noticeably chalkier and less sweet, and you lose about half the fibre.
Make ahead · store · freeze
Make the paste and whisk it into the curd up to 1 day ahead and keep it in the fridge; add the cucumber and temper within 40 minutes of serving. Finished, fridge 1 day only. Do not freeze.
Leftovers
Drain, blend with 150 ml of cold water and a little cumin, and drink it as a cucumber sambharam. Or drain and fold the solids into a cabbage thoran off the heat.
Troubleshooting
Watery within the hour: the cucumber was salted early, or the seeds were left in.
Bitter: the stem end of the cucumber. Cut 2 cm off it and taste before dicing the rest.
Flat: not enough green chilli or mustard. Both are the seasoning here, and both are free of sodium.
Serve with
R015 Perfect Matta Rice · R086 Rasam · R064 Beans Thoran · R040 Nadan Kozhi Curry
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