R100Baked Ethakka Appam
Pazham pori out of the oven, and what that costs
R104
Savoury Kozhukkatta
Steamed rice dumplings with a moong dal filling
Photograph: Adobe Stock · representative of the dish
Plan ahead: plus 4 hours soaking the dal — required.
The re-engineeringThe traditional kozhukkatta is sweet — coconut and jaggery inside a rice shell. This one is savoury, and the filling is 120 g of moong dal, which takes the protein from about 2 g a serving to nearly 10 g. Nothing is fried at any stage, and the whole dish uses 8 g of oil.
Steaming is Kerala's great technique and the one that most obviously belongs in a tea-time chapter: puttu, idiyappam, ada, vattayappam and kozhukkatta are all cooked in steam, and none of them absorbs a gram of fat. What a tea-time snack almost never has is protein, and that is why most people are hungry again at six. A dumpling filled with seasoned dal is the highest-protein snack in this chapter, and at 246 kcal for three of them it is also the most filling.
Before you start: The dough is made with boiling water and must be kneaded while it is almost too hot to touch. Have the filling completely finished and cooled before you start it, because the dough stiffens as it cools and cannot be re-softened.
Savoury Kozhukkatta
Active 40 minutes Total 1 hour 10 minutes
Scale
4 servings
Ingredients — tap to tick off
- ✓For the filling:
- ✓120 g (⅔ cup) green gram dal (moong dal), soaked 4 hours and drained
- ✓4 g (¾ tsp) sesame (gingelly) oil
- ✓2 g (⅓ tsp) mustard seed
- ✓10 g (about 2) green chillies, finely chopped
- ✓5 g (a 1 cm piece) ginger, finely grated
- ✓3 g (about 10 leaves) curry leaves, torn
- ✓35 g (⅓ cup) fresh grated coconut
- ✓1 g (¼ tsp) salt
- ✓For the dough:
- ✓100 g (¾ cup) rice flour, preferably roasted
- ✓170 ml boiling water
- ✓4 g (¾ tsp) sesame (gingelly) oil
- ✓1 g (¼ tsp) salt
Allergens: Sesame, mustard.
Equipment: Steamer or idli stand; heavy pan for the dough; small pan for the filling. Substitute: a colander over a pan with a tight lid steams perfectly well. An idli stand gives flatter dumplings and needs 2 minutes less.
Per serving (estimated)
| Energy | 246 kcal |
| Protein | 10 g |
| Fibre | 5 g |
| Net carbohydrate | 37 g |
| Total carbohydrate | 42 g |
| Sugars | 2 g |
| Fat | 6 g |
| Saturated fat | 4 g |
| Sodium | 200 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
- Steam the drained moong dal in a covered dish for , until a grain crushes between finger and thumb but the mass has not gone to paste. It should still be recognisably individual grains.
- Temper: heat the 4 g of oil in the small pan until a mustard seed dropped in sizzles at once. Add the mustard and wait until it pops steadily, 30–40 seconds. Add the green chilli, ginger and curry leaf and fry 30–40 seconds, until the ginger smells sweet rather than raw.
- Fold in the steamed dal, the coconut and the 1 g of salt, and cook over a low flame, until the mixture is dry enough to hold together when squeezed in a fist. A wet filling will burst the dough. Cool completely, .
- Make the dough: bring the 170 ml of water to a full boil with the 4 g of oil and the 1 g of salt. Take it off the heat, tip in all the rice flour at once, and stir hard with a wooden spoon until it comes together into a shaggy mass with no dry flour, 30–45 seconds. Cover and leave .
- Knead the warm dough in the pan with the back of the spoon and then, as soon as you can bear it, with a wet hand, until it is completely smooth and does not crack when you bend a small piece, . If it cracks, work in a tablespoon of boiling water and knead again.
- Shape: divide into 12 pieces of about 23 g. With wet palms, flatten each into a 7 cm disc, place a teaspoon of filling in the middle, and draw the edges up and pinch them closed, then roll gently into a ball or shape into a flattened pouch. Keep everything not being worked under a damp cloth.
- Steam the dumplings in a single layer over rolling water, , until the surface has gone from chalky-matt to faintly translucent and glossy and a dumpling lifts without sticking. Under-steamed kozhukkatta tastes of raw flour and there is no rescue.
- Rest before serving. They firm up as the starch sets and are much easier to handle.
Why this worksBoiling water gelatinises the rice starch at once, which is what makes a glutenless flour behave like a dough. Keeping the dal grains whole rather than mashing them leaves the filling dry enough not to split the shell, and it keeps the pulse doing what pulses do: 50 g of legumes eaten with brown rice lowered glycaemic response 22.9% below white rice, against 19.8% for changing the rice alone.
Sourcing note
Use the fine rice flour sold for puttu or kozhukkatta — coarse rice flour will not make a dough that holds. If yours is unroasted, dry-roast it in a pan over a low flame until it smells faintly toasted and feels loose rather than sticky between the fingers, 4–5 minutes, and cool it before use; roasted flour absorbs water more predictably. Moong dal is in every supermarket. Do not use split-and-skinned moong that has been pre-cooked or "instant" — it goes to purée in the steamer.
If you are watching…
Blood sugar: 37 g of net carbohydrate, but with 10 g of protein and 5 g of fibre in the same package, which is a very different proposition from 37 g of net carbohydrate in a fried banana. This is the dish in the chapter to eat if you are choosing on glycaemic grounds.
Blood pressure: 200 mg a serving, all from 2 g of added salt across 12 dumplings. It tastes properly seasoned at 1.5 g, which brings it to 150 mg.
Cholesterol: 4 g of saturated fat, almost entirely from the 35 g of fresh coconut. Sesame oil rather than coconut oil is specified throughout, at 16% saturated against coconut oil's 91%.
Swap it
Cooked vanpayar (red cowpea) for the moong dal → Consequence: earthier and firmer, fibre up from 5 g to about 6 g a serving, and 10 minutes longer to cook. Arguably the better dumpling.
Cooked kadala (black chickpeas), coarsely crushed → Consequence: the highest-fibre version of all, at about 8 g a serving, and a coarser filling that needs a thicker dough.
Ragi flour for a third of the rice flour → Consequence: darker, nuttier and more fragile to shape, with fibre up by about 2 g a serving.
Traditional sweet filling — 60 g coconut with 30 g jaggery → Consequence: the kozhukkatta everyone knows, at about 235 kcal and 3 g of protein a serving, with sugars up from 2 g to about 10 g. A sweet, not a savoury.
Salt replaced with the 70:30 potassium blend (M07) → sodium falls from 200 mg to about 140 mg a serving. Consequence: it works well here, because the salt is inside a fatty coconut filling where potassium chloride's metallic edge is masked. Potassium-enriched salt is not for readers with chronic kidney disease, or on a RAAS inhibitor (an ACE inhibitor or an ARB) or a potassium-sparing diuretic, without a doctor's approval.
Scale it
Water does not scale exactly — flours differ in absorption. Hold back 20 ml and add it during the knead if the dough cracks.
Make ahead · store · freeze
Make the filling up to 2 days ahead and keep it in the fridge; make the dough on the day, because it stiffens irreversibly overnight. Shaped raw dumplings: fridge 6 hours under a damp cloth. Cooked: fridge 3 days, re-steamed 5–6 minutes. Freeze 2 months shaped and raw, frozen on a tray then bagged, steamed from frozen for 16–18 minutes. Reheat by steaming; a microwave makes the shell tough.
Leftovers
Troubleshooting
Cracked dough: not enough water, or it was kneaded cold. Add a tablespoon of boiling water and knead again while hot.
Burst in the steamer: the filling was wet, or overfilled. A teaspoon per 23 g of dough is the limit.
Tastes of raw flour: under-steamed. Give them 3 minutes more; there is no other fix.
Tough and rubbery: over-steamed, or reheated in a microwave.
Sticky to shape: wet your palms rather than flouring them. Flour on the outside bakes into a chalky skin.
Serve with
R094 Tomato Chutney · R093 Coconut Chutney, Rebuilt · R106 Chai · R107 Sambharam
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