R089Kerala Kitchen Salad
Raw vegetables the way a Kerala kitchen cuts them
Recipes › Salads, Pachadis, Chutneys, Podis and Pickles
R095
Kanji Podi
The dry podi that makes rice gruel a meal
Photograph: Adobe Stock · representative of the dish
Plan ahead: plus 20 minutes cooling — required.
The re-engineeringNo salt at all, and the savoury weight carried by roasted pulse and dried coconut instead. A tablespoon over kanji replaces the pinch of salt and the spoon of pickle the bowl usually gets, and brings 1.5 g of protein and a gram of fibre with it.
Kanji — rice cooked loose in its own water — is Kerala's convalescent food, monsoon food and late-night food, and it is almost always eaten with something salty on the side: pickle, pappadam, dried fish. That side dish is where the sodium is. A dry podi does the same job by a different route, and unlike pickle it keeps for months and costs nothing per spoonful. This is a close cousin of M06 and can be used interchangeably with it; this version is sweeter and coarser, because coconut belongs in a kanji bowl.
Before you start: Strip the curry leaves and check them for moisture. Damp leaves will not crisp, and a podi made with damp leaves cakes solid within a fortnight.
Kanji Podi
Active 25 minutes Total 45 minutes
Scale
165 servings
Ingredients — tap to tick off
- ✓60 g (⅓ cup) green gram dal (moong dal)
- ✓40 g (3½ tbsp) Bengal gram dal (chana dal)
- ✓30 g (⅓ cup) dried coconut (copra), grated or thinly sliced
- ✓20 g (about 12) dried red chillies
- ✓10 g (about 5 sprigs, stripped) curry leaves
- ✓6 g (¾ tbsp) black peppercorns
- ✓4 g (¾ tsp) cumin seed
- ✓3 g (½ tsp) asafoetida
- ✓No salt. That is the point of the jar.
Allergens: None of the major allergens as the recipe is written. Gluten (wheat) — only if your asafoetida is compounded with wheat flour, as most brands are.
Equipment: Heavy dry pan, 24 cm; spice grinder or mixie with a small jar. Substitute: a mortar gives a coarser podi, which suits kanji better than a fine one.
Method — tap a step to mark it done, tap a time to start a timer
- Roast the chana dal over medium-low heat, stirring constantly, until it is pale honey-brown and one grain snaps rather than bends, . Tip onto a cold plate.
- Roast the moong dal the same way, , until it is the colour of weak tea and smells of biscuit. Moong colours faster than chana.
- Roast the dried coconut on a low flame, stirring without pause, until it is evenly the colour of dark toast and smells nutty with a distinct edge of smoke, . It goes from right to burnt in about 90 seconds, so tip it out the moment it is there.
- Roast the chillies until they blister and darken by a shade, , then the pepper and cumin together for , until the pepper starts to pop.
- Roast the curry leaves last, on the lowest flame, until they crumble to dust between finger and thumb, . If they bend rather than crumble they are still wet.
- Cool everything to room temperature, , then grind with the asafoetida to a coarse, sandy powder. Stop while it still feels gritty: texture is one of the levers that makes low-salt food read as seasoned, and a fine podi tastes flatter than a coarse one.
Why this worksRoasting the dals and the coconut generates Maillard products — pyrazines, furans, thiazoles — that the brain reads as savoury and cooked, the same reason browned onion tastes rich. Curry leaf adds terpene aroma and pepper adds trigeminal warmth. Aroma and pungency together let a bowl of kanji taste seasoned with no sodium at all, and the dal brings protein and fibre to a dish that has neither.
Sourcing note
Use dried coconut (copra, sold as "coconut copra" or "dried coconut" in South Asian shops), not desiccated coconut, which has been defatted and shredded and burns before it toasts. Where only desiccated is available, use 25 g and add it in the last 90 seconds of roasting. Asafoetida sold in India is usually compounded with wheat flour; the resin lump is stronger and 2 g will do.
If you are watching…
Blood pressure: under 10 mg of sodium a tablespoon, replacing a spoon of pickle at roughly 200 mg or a pappadam at rather more. Used twice a day instead of a salted condiment, this jar is worth a few hundred milligrams a day against a 2,000 mg target.
Blood sugar: a pulse-based podi over kanji is a small version of the best-evidenced habit in this book — adding legumes to a rice meal lowered glycaemic response more than changing the rice did.
Cholesterol: 0.7 g of saturated fat a tablespoon, from the copra. Leave the coconut out and it falls to about 0.2 g.
Swap it
Fresh coconut, dry-roasted, for copra → Consequence: better flavour, shorter life. Roast it until completely dry or the podi will keep two weeks rather than two months.
Add 8 g of powdered dried prawn or dried fish → a large jump in savoury depth. Consequence stated plainly: dried fish is heavily salted, the podi is no longer low-sodium, and no further salt should go anywhere near the dish. (Allergen: this swap introduces fish, crustaceans.)
No moong dal → all chana. Consequence: slightly less sweet, no other loss.
Add 5 g of roasted fenugreek seed → Consequence: a pleasant bitterness that suits kanji. Note that this is a flavouring quantity, roughly 0.2 g a tablespoon, and about fifty times below the 10–25 g daily doses at which fenugreek trials found glycaemic effects. No claim is made for it here.
Scale it
At 330 g, roast in two batches. A crowded pan steams the dal instead of toasting it.
Make ahead · store · freeze
Cupboard 6 weeks — shorter than a spice podi, because the roasted dal and copra carry fat that oxidises and curry-leaf aroma goes first. Fridge 4 months. Freeze 9 months in a small jar, decanting a fortnight at a time so the main jar is never warmed and cooled.
Leftovers
A podi does not generate leftovers, but an old jar that has lost its aroma is not waste: stir 3 tablespoons into a thoran off the heat, or into a dal, where the flatness disappears into the dish.
Troubleshooting
Tastes of nothing: the curry leaves were damp or the dals under-roasted. Neither fault shows until you taste.
Caked solid: moisture. Dry it on a tray at 60°C (140°F) for 15–20 minutes, cool completely, and re-grind.
Bitter: the copra or the moong dal burned. Both go from right to wrong inside two minutes.
Rancid after a month: the copra. Keep the jar in the fridge in a warm kitchen.
Serve with
R012 Kanji with a Pulse · R020 Kanji Three Ways · R008 Ragi Dosa · boiled tubers · R073 Chena Mezhukkupuratti
Tap a star to rate this recipe
