R107Sambharam
Spiced buttermilk, Kerala's summer drink
R110
Lime and Nannari Sharbat, Unsweetened
Sarsaparilla root and lime, without the syrup
Photograph: Adobe Stock · representative of the dish
Plan ahead: plus 2 hours chilling — recommended.
The re-engineeringCommercial nannari sharbat is a sugar syrup with root extract in it — the sugar is the product and the root is the flavour. This version reverses that: a strong root decoction carries the drink, lime supplies the sharpness, and the sweetener is either absent or a token 4 g across a litre.
Nannari root gives a drink that tastes like nothing else — faintly vanilla, faintly medicinal, cooling in a way that is hard to describe and immediately recognisable to anyone who grew up with the roadside bottle. In the summer months, across Kerala and Tamil Nadu, it is sold as a thick dark syrup let down with water and lime. The syrup is where the sugar hides, at proportions that make a glass closer to a soft drink than to a herbal infusion. Make the decoction yourself and you get the whole flavour and none of the load.
Before you start: Rinse the dried root twice. It is a root, it was in the ground, and the first rinse water will be brown with soil rather than with flavour.
Lime and Nannari Sharbat, Unsweetened
Active 10 minutes Total 45 minutes
Scale
4 servings
Ingredients — tap to tick off
- ✓15 g dried nannari root (Hemidesmus indicus), rinsed twice and broken into 3 cm lengths
- ✓500 ml water, for the decoction
- ✓500 ml cold water, to finish
- ✓60 ml (about 3 small limes) fresh lime juice
- ✓1 g (¼ tsp) salt, or M07
- ✓4 g grated jaggery — optional, and this is the whole sugar allowance for a litre
- ✓8 mint leaves, bruised
- ✓ice, to serve
Allergens: None of the major allergens.
Equipment: Small pan; fine sieve; a 1.5-litre jug. Substitute: nothing needed beyond a pan. If you have a muslin square, use it for the second straining — the root sheds fine fibres.
Per serving (estimated)
| Energy | 6 kcal |
| Protein | 0 g |
| Fibre | 0 g |
| Net carbohydrate | 1 g |
| Total carbohydrate | 1 g |
| Sugars | 1 g |
| Fat | 0 g |
| Saturated fat | 0 g |
| Sodium | 100 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
- Rinse the root twice in cold water, rubbing the pieces between your fingers, until the water runs clear.
- Simmer the root in the 500 ml of water, uncovered, until the liquid is the colour of weak coffee and smells sweetly of vanilla and earth, . It should reduce to roughly 350 ml. A pale, thin decoction means the root was old or the simmer too short.
- Strain through a fine sieve, then again through muslin if you have it, pressing the root to get the last of the liquid. Cool to room temperature, .
- Combine the decoction with the 500 ml cold water in the jug.
- Add the lime juice, the salt and the jaggery if you are using it, and stir until nothing grainy is left on the bottom of the jug.
- Taste. It should be sour first, faintly saline, and sweet only as an afterthought. If it tastes of nothing, it needs salt and lime rather than sugar — salt is what makes an unsweetened sour drink read as a drink rather than as water with lime in it.
- Chill , add the mint at the last minute, and pour over ice.
Why this worksSweetness is only one of the things a sharbat is doing. Sour, cold, aromatic and faintly saline all register as refreshment independently, and a small amount of sodium raises the perceived intensity of both the acid and the aroma. Remove the sugar and add back salt, cold, acid and volatiles and the drink still lands — which is the same craft principle Chapter 10 applies to cutting salt, run in the other direction.
Sourcing note
Nannari — also called nannari veru, Indian sarsaparilla, or anantamool in the north — is sold as dried root pieces in Kerala and Tamil Nadu groceries, in Ayurvedic pharmacies, and reliably online; a 100 g bag lasts a whole summer and keeps a year in a sealed jar. Outside South Asia it is genuinely hard to find fresh, and here is the honest position: most Western "sarsaparilla" is a different plant entirely (Smilax species, or in root-beer flavourings, sassafras and wintergreen), and it will not taste like this. Do not substitute it and expect nannari. What you can do instead is order the dried Indian root online — it ships well, being dry root — or accept that this drink will be a trip-home drink and make R111 Sulaimani meanwhile. Nannari syrup is also sold in bottles by Kerala and Tamil brands; if you buy it, read the label, because sugar is almost always the first ingredient, and this recipe is specifically the version that avoids it.
If you are watching…
Blood sugar: one gram of carbohydrate a glass. This is the drink to hand people at a summer gathering instead of the bottled thing, and nobody will notice they have been managed.
Blood pressure: 100 mg sodium a glass from a quarter-teaspoon of salt across a litre. Leave the salt out if you are working hard on sodium — the drink needs more lime to compensate and is still good.
Cholesterol: nothing here to matter either way.
Swap it
No nannari → a strong infusion of 6 g dried hibiscus with a 2 cm strip of ginger. Completely different: tart, red, floral, no vanilla note at all. Good drink, not this drink.
Lime → lemon, at about three-quarters the volume for the same acidity. Rounder and less floral.
The 4 g jaggery → leave it out. Most people cannot detect 4 g of sweetness across a litre anyway, which is a useful thing to learn by trying.
Want it sweeter for guests → 20 g jaggery across the litre takes each glass to about 26 kcal and 6 g of sugar, still a fraction of the commercial version. Above that you are making the bottled drink again.
Make ahead · store · freeze
The decoction keeps 5 days in the fridge and is the part worth making in advance — make a strong 500 ml batch and build glasses from it through the week. The finished, limed drink is best within 24 hours; the lime dulls after that. Freeze the decoction 3 months in an ice-cube tray, which is the neatest way to keep it, and drop two cubes into a glass of soda water.
Leftovers
Spent nannari root has given up its flavour and belongs in the bin. Leftover finished sharbat is excellent as the liquid in a fruit granita, or frozen into lollies for children, which is a considerably better use of a freezer than shop-bought ones.
Troubleshooting
Pale, thin, tasteless decoction: old root, or too short a simmer. Give it another 10 minutes and check the colour against weak coffee.
Muddy or gritty: the root was not rinsed, or you skipped the second straining. Both are fixable next time; a coffee filter rescues this batch.
Tastes like sour water: under-seasoned. Add salt in 0.25 g increments before you reach for sweetness. The improvement is startling.
Bitter rather than vanilla-sweet: boiled too hard rather than simmered. Nannari wants a lazy simmer, not a rolling boil.
Serve with
R100 Baked Ethakka Appam · R105 Roasted Kadala Mix · anything fried, where its job is to cut fat rather than to add sugar · M07 the 70:30 salt
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