Don't get me wrong. I am not in gourmand-mode, hosting one of those fine-cuisines-shows where I roam the world. The search for the perfect idli is confined to the three walls (or, if you want to be all technical, the two walls and counter) of my modular kitchen.
Like any Tam-Bram worth his salt, I grew up in a world of sights, sounds and smells. The sight of the raw material - those fat, oblong rice grains and the pure-white and incredibly viscous batter that they morphed into; the nearly inaudible hiss of perfectly fermented batter falling from the hollow spoon (try pronouncing kuzhuval, the name for that type of spoon) as my mom stirred it; the whistles from the pressure cooker that I have already blogged about here; and finally, the aroma of freshly steamed idlis along with mulaga-podi (which I will blog about in due course) and home-made ghee.
For the "Punctuation Nazis" out there (a nod to thoughtengine a.k.a. Arvind), the fact that I do not italicize the word "idli" shows how much I regard it as a part of regular English vocabulary :)
Rarely did my mom get anything wrong, and her penchant for perfection was symbolized in the idlis she made. Every one of them looked exactly the same - like an albino UFO - and to the uninitiated, the sight of this dish would be quite unsettling. And yet each morsel was simple heaven, devoid of the heaviness that a regular dish leaves you with. As a kid, I loved dissecting each of my 16 idlis per meal with a butter-knife just to extract the air-pockets that had been formed during fermentation. It's difficult to explain, and you have to see for yourself what I mean :)
And then I came to the US, where everything including traffic is upside-down. You try to make any dish that involves some level of effort and you find that getting all the ingredients is one heck of an effort. Even if you do manage to procure the ingredients through a combination of luck, smooth-talking friends with cars into taking you with them and then lugging bags from the Indian grocery store, you later find that the weather is just not India enough!
To my credit, I tried hard, so much that my roommates labeled me the "Robert Bruce" of this generation (an appellation that I gratefully, and not with a small amount of pride, accept ;) ). I mostly got the look of the batter right - I mean how much effort does that take? But the bloody idlis just refused to budge from their hemispherical position to rise up like fluffy perfection.
I'd taken to randomly assigning numbers to each of my attempts, and finally, attempt #454 paid off. As I gingerly, and with my heart in my mouth, slid the cooker top off, there it was! A tiny, barely noticeable, and therefore all the more significant, bump. My idlis had risen!
Of course, pure ecstasy, by its definition, dictated that I lost all consciousness and rationality, which was why I completely forgot to document exactly what I'd done to get it that way. And therefore, here I am, blogging about the 455th attempt as my idli batter sits in the (now completely defaced) kitchen. Which is of course, why there isn't an image to this blog post.
Recording for posterity the procedure:
Like any Tam-Bram worth his salt, I grew up in a world of sights, sounds and smells. The sight of the raw material - those fat, oblong rice grains and the pure-white and incredibly viscous batter that they morphed into; the nearly inaudible hiss of perfectly fermented batter falling from the hollow spoon (try pronouncing kuzhuval, the name for that type of spoon) as my mom stirred it; the whistles from the pressure cooker that I have already blogged about here; and finally, the aroma of freshly steamed idlis along with mulaga-podi (which I will blog about in due course) and home-made ghee.
For the "Punctuation Nazis" out there (a nod to thoughtengine a.k.a. Arvind), the fact that I do not italicize the word "idli" shows how much I regard it as a part of regular English vocabulary :)
Rarely did my mom get anything wrong, and her penchant for perfection was symbolized in the idlis she made. Every one of them looked exactly the same - like an albino UFO - and to the uninitiated, the sight of this dish would be quite unsettling. And yet each morsel was simple heaven, devoid of the heaviness that a regular dish leaves you with. As a kid, I loved dissecting each of my 16 idlis per meal with a butter-knife just to extract the air-pockets that had been formed during fermentation. It's difficult to explain, and you have to see for yourself what I mean :)
And then I came to the US, where everything including traffic is upside-down. You try to make any dish that involves some level of effort and you find that getting all the ingredients is one heck of an effort. Even if you do manage to procure the ingredients through a combination of luck, smooth-talking friends with cars into taking you with them and then lugging bags from the Indian grocery store, you later find that the weather is just not India enough!
To my credit, I tried hard, so much that my roommates labeled me the "Robert Bruce" of this generation (an appellation that I gratefully, and not with a small amount of pride, accept ;) ). I mostly got the look of the batter right - I mean how much effort does that take? But the bloody idlis just refused to budge from their hemispherical position to rise up like fluffy perfection.
I'd taken to randomly assigning numbers to each of my attempts, and finally, attempt #454 paid off. As I gingerly, and with my heart in my mouth, slid the cooker top off, there it was! A tiny, barely noticeable, and therefore all the more significant, bump. My idlis had risen!
Of course, pure ecstasy, by its definition, dictated that I lost all consciousness and rationality, which was why I completely forgot to document exactly what I'd done to get it that way. And therefore, here I am, blogging about the 455th attempt as my idli batter sits in the (now completely defaced) kitchen. Which is of course, why there isn't an image to this blog post.
Recording for posterity the procedure:
- 4 cups of "idli rice". Considering that this is the US, you can be pretty sure that it's not Idli rice per se that you buy, but some mix of Homi Mali and Mexican.
- 2 cups of white urad dal. I hope this is at least what the packaging says it is.
- Wash these in separate containers, but not excessively. One wash should suffice.
- Leave them for 6-8 hours (considering that US temperature and humidity are not the same as India).
- After this, I actually put them into the fridge for a day.
- Grind in a mixer with very little water, only enough to make the mixer blade move.
- Pour the batter into a metal container and (this step is critical) mix with your hands. This will transfer yeast, hopefully.
- Add salt to taste. For me, 4 spoons of salt should suffice.
- Fermentation, the next critical step, requires temperatures of roughly 100F (X degrees C) for about 6 hours. For this, 6 hours in an oven with the oven-light on should be a good place to start.
A great blog post for all you Indian chefs in America, that discusses the same desi dish with an American twist: http://chefinyou.com/2009/01/idli-recipe/
Oh, a word of warning before you read that: it looks like that blogger had even more patience and perseverance. Bravo! (and I hope you have more patient roommates than mine ;) Mine never stopped teasing me for not giving them a taste of the sorta-successful attempt #455!)
Oh, a word of warning before you read that: it looks like that blogger had even more patience and perseverance. Bravo! (and I hope you have more patient roommates than mine ;) Mine never stopped teasing me for not giving them a taste of the sorta-successful attempt #455!)
5 comments:
Next time try taking 1 cup of rad dal for every 2 cups of rice.
And for fermentation it's usually kept overnight, so do consider the drop in temperature, unless the temp at ur place drops to single digits.
:)
I usually add salt after the batter is fermented over night,just before steaming. salt may slow down fermentation.
splendid....
thanks!
Haha. Bravo. I will forward it to my friends in the diaspora.
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