Receta Kerala -- Appam with Vegetable Stew
From Karnataka, we are going a little south to the beautiful state of Kerala. Kerala is known as God's Own Country because of the beautiful beaches, backwaters, mountain ranges and breathtaking scenic views. It is one of the fastest growing tourist destination in the world.
Kerala is the first state in India to be recognized as a completely literate state. Kerala has a large number of Hindu temples and the temples have unique traditions. We visited some of the temples and hill stations when we visited Kerala years ago; some places I still remember are Cochin, Guruvayur, Trivandrum, Kottayam falls.
Cuisine: Kerala cuisine has both vegetarian and non-vegetarian dishes. Many spices like pepper, cardamom, cloves, cinnamon are cultivated in Kerala and they find a very special place in their cuisine making it richly spicy and special. Coconuts grow in abundance in Kerala and consequently all forms of coconut is widely used in Kerala dishes. Because of the long coastline, numerous rivers and backwater networks, Kerala cuisine has a lot of sea food based dishes.
Sadya is the most famous main course food of Kerala. It is a vegetarian festive meal served on a banana leaf. Sadya is served for occasions like weddings, house-warming ceremony, for birthdays and for regional festivals and most importantly for Onam.
Staple Food: Rice and Cassava.
Specialties: Malabar Biryani, Aviyal, Thoran, Puliserry, Olan, Mooru, Upperi and so on.
Today's Dish: I have tried a few dishes from Kerala in the past. Making Kerala appam has been on my to-make list for a very long time. So I finally decided to make it for this marathon. It is made with ground rice that is fermented and resulting appams are fluffy and soft. They are served with Kerala stew, chana masala or other gravy side dishes and with sweetened coconut milk.
I postponed making this dish to the first week of March hoping that the weather would get a little warmer and the batter would ferment. But as luck as it, winter this year was especially brutal and decided to stick around until the end of March. It took me almost 2 days to get any sort of action going in the batter, that too after keeping it in warm oven. I started with a recipe that doesn't use yeast or baking soda, but I ended up adding some baking soda before making them to get nice fluffy appams.
I served them with vegetable stew and Kerala style Egg curry.
Recipe adapted from Akshus Kitchen: