R089Kerala Kitchen Salad
Raw vegetables the way a Kerala kitchen cuts them
Recipes › Salads, Pachadis, Chutneys, Podis and Pickles
R098
Inji Puli, Reworked
The sadya's ginger, tamarind and jaggery relish, with the sugar shown
Photograph: Adobe Stock · representative of the dish
The re-engineeringJaggery down from 180 g to 60 g in a batch that yields about 25 tablespoons. Here is the arithmetic in full: at 180 g, a tablespoon of inji puli carries about 7.4 g of sugars and 39 kcal. At 60 g it carries 2.7 g and 20 kcal. The tamarind and ginger are untouched, and they are what the dish actually tastes of.
Inji puli — also called puli inji, and one of the two or three dishes on a sadya leaf that people remember for the rest of their lives — is eaten in Kerala after the payasam, specifically to cut the sweetness of what came before. There is something quietly absurd about a palate-cleanser containing 180 g of jaggery. Cut it to a third and the dish does its job better, not worse: sharper, hotter, more obviously gingery, and still recognisably itself.
Before you start: Chop the ginger before anything else; 120 g finely chopped takes 10 minutes and everything after step 3 moves fast.
Inji Puli, Reworked
Active 30 minutes Total 45 minutes
Scale
380 servings
Ingredients — tap to tick off
- ✓40 g (3 tbsp, packed) tamarind, soaked in 200 ml warm water for 20 minutes
- ✓10 g (2 tsp) sesame (gingelly) oil
- ✓3 g (½ tsp) mustard seed
- ✓2 g (1 small) dried red chilli, broken
- ✓2 g (⅓ tsp) fenugreek seed
- ✓3 g (about 10 leaves) curry leaves
- ✓120 g (a 12 cm piece) fresh ginger, peeled and very finely chopped
- ✓20 g (about 4) green chillies, finely chopped
- ✓3 g (½ tsp) Kashmiri chilli powder
- ✓1 g (¼ tsp) ground turmeric
- ✓60 g (4 tbsp, packed) jaggery, grated
- ✓4 g (⅔ tsp) salt
Allergens: Sesame, mustard.
Equipment: Heavy 20 cm pan; fine sieve for the tamarind. Substitute: a non-stick pan is genuinely useful here, because a jaggery reduction catches easily at the end.
Method — tap a step to mark it done, tap a time to start a timer
- Soak the tamarind in the warm water until it softens to the texture of a dried apricot, , then squeeze it out and strain, discarding the fibre and seed. Keep all 200 ml.
- Heat the sesame oil in the pan until a mustard seed dropped in sizzles at once. Add the mustard and wait until it pops steadily rather than sporadically, 30–40 seconds.
- Add the dried chilli, fenugreek and curry leaf and fry 15–20 seconds, until the fenugreek darkens by a shade. Any longer and it turns bitter.
- Add the ginger and green chilli and fry over a medium-low flame, stirring often, until the ginger has lost its raw sharp smell, turned pale gold and begun to smell sweet, . This step is the whole dish; underdo it and the relish tastes raw for a week.
- Add the chilli powder and turmeric and stir 30 seconds, then pour in the tamarind water and the salt.
- Simmer uncovered until the liquid has reduced by about half and darkened, .
- Add the jaggery and continue to cook, stirring more often as it thickens, until the mixture is glossy and dark and a spoon dragged across the base leaves a track that fills in slowly, . It will thicken further on cooling, so stop while it still moves.
- Cool completely before jarring. Taste when cold, not hot — jaggery reads sweeter warm, and a relish that tastes right in the pan will taste flat the next day.
Why this worksFrying the ginger for a full 8–10 minutes drives off its raw pungency and develops sweetness, so less jaggery is needed to balance the tamarind. Tamarind is flat and frankly acidic rather than rounded, and its acid amplifies perceived saltiness — which is why 4 g of salt across 25 tablespoons tastes fully seasoned. Sugar was never the flavour here. It was only the brake on the acid.
Sourcing note
Old, fibrous ginger is better here than young ginger — it is more pungent and it holds its texture through the reduction. Peel it with a spoon rather than a peeler to save the flesh just under the skin, where much of the aroma sits. Where jaggery is unavailable, dark muscovado or panela at 1:1 by weight is essentially the same product; palm jaggery (karuppatti) is darker and more mineral and is the traditional choice in some households.
If you are watching…
Blood sugar: the point of this recipe. Four g of net carbohydrate a tablespoon rather than eight, in a dish eaten immediately after payasam — that is, at the moment in a sadya when blood glucose is already climbing hardest.
Blood pressure: 60 mg a tablespoon, the lowest of any condiment in this chapter, because tamarind and ginger are doing the work that salt usually does.
Cholesterol: 0.1 g of saturated fat a tablespoon, because this is made with sesame oil rather than coconut oil.
Swap it
Coconut oil for sesame → Consequence: the traditional smell, and saturated fat rises from 0.1 g to about 0.4 g a tablespoon. A small change; this is a dish where sesame is arguably better anyway.
Dates for the jaggery, 80 g stoned and chopped → Consequence: a fruitier, thicker relish with a little fibre; the sugars land at about 3.5 g a tablespoon, so this is a modest reduction rather than a large one.
No jaggery at all → Consequence: aggressively sour and genuinely difficult to eat. Sixty grams is already close to the floor; do not go below 40 g.
Add 20 g of slivered garlic at step 4 → Consequence: deeper and more savoury, further from the sadya version, and garlic is the one aromatic in this book with a blood-pressure effect at ordinary culinary doses.
Scale it
At the largest quantity add 6–8 minutes to step 6 and stir continuously through step 7; a deep mass of jaggery reduction catches without warning.
Make ahead · store · freeze
Better after 3 days and best after a week. Fridge 6 weeks in a sterilised jar with a dry spoon — the acid and the sugar together make this the most stable preparation in the chapter, but at 60 g of jaggery rather than 180 g there is less sugar doing preservative work, so refrigerate it rather than leaving it out. Freeze 6 months in 60 g portions. Cupboard: 1 week only, and only in a cool kitchen below 25°C (77°F).
Leftovers
A tablespoon stirred into a fish curry at the end gives it the sweet-sour-hot finish of a Malabar mango curry. It also makes an unexpectedly good glaze for baked fish, thinned with a little water and brushed on in the last five minutes.
Troubleshooting
Bitter: the fenugreek burned at step 3. It needs 15–20 seconds, not a minute.
Raw and harsh, even after a week: step 4 was cut short. There is no way to fix this afterwards.
Set hard in the jar: over-reduced at step 7. Stir in 20 ml of hot water and it will come back.
Thin and watery: under-reduced. Return it to the pan and cook it down; it costs nothing but time.
Serve with
R120 the sadya leaf · R015 Perfect Matta Rice · R069 Avial · R112 Palada, immediately after
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