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It's a sweet dream

Last Updated 06 October 2014, 14:39 IST

Culinary experiments have become the order of the day. Nevertheless, traditional recipes have a place of their own. In our new column, we feature Nagalakshmi Krishnan, who shares, in her own words, her favourite recipe – the sweet rice puttu

I have always been fond of cooking. In the olden days, the young girls in the Tamil Brahmin community were advised by the elderly ladies to learn how to cook. My grandmother Subbalakshmi lived in a small village called Mahadanapuram in Kanyakumari district and made wonderful delicacies. My sisters and I used to relish everything she made.

She would tell us that we should learn the signature dishes of our community before we got married. She taught me a number of dishes like poricha kozhambu and avial. But one dish that is closest to my heart is the sweet rice puttu.

This is not your typical Kerala puttu, but a variation of it. The sweet rice puttu was one dish that we would watch my grandmother prepare year after year. Those days, all the ladies of the house would cook together. I had one brother and two sisters and being the youngest in the family, I got the largest portion of it to savour!

During the festive season, my grandmother would be busy performing poojas and making prasadam, which she would give to all the neighbours. But she also realised that the children of the family were hungry. So in the evenings, she made us her special sweet puttu, which was quite filling.

My grandmother told me that making this dish on a Friday and offering it to Goddess Parvati was considered auspicious.

When I got married, she passed on this recipe to me as I too loved cooking. I made it for the first time during my first Navaratri after marriage. I was slightly nervous as it’s a tough dish to master when it comes to the texture and consistency. But with practice, I became better at it.

I have been making this dish for almost 40 years now and thanks to my love for cooking, I have mastered several other South Indian snacks like kai murukku and athirisam. In fact, on a visit to the United States, I won an athirisam making competition organised by the Tamil Sangam in the Bay Area.

To this day, I enjoy making and eating this puttu because it reminds me of my wonderful grandmother. Even if I make it with one kilo of rice, it gets over in no time!

Sweet rice ‘puttu’

Raw rice - 2 cups
Jaggery - 1.5 cups
Grated coconut - 4 tsp
Cardamom -
2 (powdered)
Ghee - 2 tablespoon
Cashewnuts and almonds (chopped) - 4-5 each
A pinch of salt
A pinch of turmeric

Soak the rice in the water for an hour. Drain the water completely. Spread it on a cloth and let it dry. Grind it to a coarse powder. Heat a pan and add this mixture. Fry it till the raw smell goes and it takes on a golden brown colour.

In another thick bottomed vessel, boil one cup of water, add a pinch of salt and a bit of turmeric powder (this is optional but my grandmother added it, to give the puttu a wonderful colour).

Allow the water to cool. Then add the rice flour little by little, till the flour becomes wet.
Do not make a dough out of it. It should be of a consistency where you can make balls out of it but should break at the slightest touch.

Now steam this in a cooker for ten minutes. In another pan, boil jaggery in equal amount of water, till it becomes thick. Add the steamed flour in the jaggery mix. Add cardamom powder and mix well. Add the grated coconut and switch off the gas.

Fry almonds and cashewnuts in ghee and add. The final puttu will have a rava-like consistency. Cool and serve.

(As told to Deepa Natarajan Lobo)

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(Published 06 October 2014, 14:39 IST)

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