Okay it is official. In Dec I’m attempting to cook solo for 500 people. Right from the purchase of vegetables & rice  to cleaning, cutting, cooking and serving, everything will be done by me alone. As far as I know this has not been attempted before, anywhere in the world. So I might get a shot at setting a record if I carry this through.

Iyengars believe the kitchen is a temple and what gets cooked there is ambrosia. The simplest of Iyengar curries gets suffixed with ‘amudhu (ambrosia).

Think of the Iyengar kitchen as a temple and you’ll understand why orthodox Iyengars will not eat from other kitchens and restrict access to their kitchens. This is why Iyengars prefer total silence in their kitchens and frown upon the usage of onion , garlic or spices like cloves, fennel, cinnamon / bay leaves. (These spices are not used in any temple kitchens).

For more on Iyengar cuisine check out the Yum blog or get Mrs.Kamala Wodeyar’s book.

If you are ever allowed into an Iyengar kitchen, behave as you would in a temple and you’ll not go wrong !

Tamilnadu has one of world’s oldest, unbroken culinary heritages. It is Tamilnadu which gave the word ‘Curry’. In the cook pots of traders, conquerors and workers, Tamil cuisine spread to Burma, Malaysia, Singapore and Thailand, Ceylon, South africa, West Indies etc., having a major impact on their local cuisines.

We can see four distinct cuisines in Tamilnadu.

The pure vegetarian Cauvery delta Brahmin cuisine of Thanjavur and Tiruchy in central Tamilnadu.

The mostly vegetarian, agrarian Kongunad cuisine of western Tamilnadu.

The predominantly non-vegetarian Chettinad trader cuisine of Karaikudi and neighbouring regions and the Muslim cuisine of Tamil speaking Maraikairs, Labbais and Rowtars of South Tamilnadu.

Brahmin Cuisine
The recipes of the bestselling Meenakshi Ammal’s cookbook “Samaithu Paar” exemplify Brahmin cuisine. This pure vegetarian cuisine is built around tamarind, lentils, yogurt and vegetables.

The orthodox Iyengar cuisine is more ritualistic and frowns upon usage of anything more than the very basic spices. It uses no garlic or spices like cinnamon, cloves, fennel etc.

Kongunad Cuisine
Kongunadu includes the western districts of Coimbatore , Erode, Salem, and Karur. In this agrarian and industrial belt, you’ll see the use of roasted groundnut paste, shallots( sambar onions) and copra ( dried coconut) in curries. This is where the undisputed rule of rice is challenged by millets (Samai, Thinai) jowar (Cholam), ragi (Kelvragu) and bajra ( Kambu).

Chettinad Cuisine
Chettinad, being one of the driest areas of Tamilnadu is not conducive to agriculture. Unable to farm, its people, the Chettiars, became highly successful traders, reaching far into South east Asia. In direct contrast to Brahmin cuisine, Chettinad cuisine uses meat and exotic spices extensively. Spices like marathi mokku (dried flower pods), anasipoo (star anise) and kalpasi (dried bark) are used in addition to fennel, cinnamon, cloves, bay leaf, ginger and garlic. This makes their cuisine one of the most aromatic cuisines of India.

Tamil Muslim Cuisine
Tamil Muslim cuisine is a mixture of Tamil Hindu and Muglai cuisine. Though predominantly non vegetarian, it is tempered with Tamil beliefs, and so does not use beef. Tamil Muslim curries are unique in using whole lime pickled in salt, which is mashed up and used as a souring agent.

Chettinad and Muslim cuisines specialize in non-vegetarian curries and are not covered in detail here.

Let us take a look at the major vegetarian curries cooked across Tamilnadu

0.: Kulambu :: Kulambu is a basic sour curry. Take a spoon of tamarind paste ( or two spoons if you likeit sourer) and dissolve it in a cup of water. Add a couple of pinches of sambar powder, salt and a pinch of jaggery/ sugar, bring to a boil and your basic kulambu is ready. Different types of souring agents like tomato, mango, yogurt are used in place of or in addition to tamarind to cook up a large variety of Kulambus. Add vatral ( sun dried vegetables ) to a kulambu and you have Vatral kulambu. Add fresh vegetables and you have puli kulambu. Add a mix of fresh vegetables and you have Kadamba kulambu and so on. Kulambu is thickened by adding a few pinches of rice flour dissolved in water to the boiling curry

Indosungod’s Taro root Kulambu, Manju’s Chettinad Kara Kulambu, Divya’s Mochakka Kulambu , Remya’s Ginger – garlic Kulambu, Menu’s paruppu urundai kulambu.

1.: Sambar:: Add boiled and mashed tuvar dal to a Kulambu and you have Sambar , a lentil sour curry.

Lakshmi’s Sambar with small onions, Peppermill’s Radish Sambar, Aayi’s Sambar, Soundarm’s Two dal sambar, Iyercook’s Spinach sambar, and Vanaja’s unusual Beetroot Sambar.

2.: Rasam, a lentil thin curry, is a watered down version of sambar. (Lazyboy’s rasam : Let the sambar rest after cooking. Use the top watery layer as Rasam). For a regular rasam, mix a bit of tamarind paste in lentil water ( the water in which lentils have been cooked) , add a bit of Rasam powder / sambar powder, simmer for a few minutes and Rasam is ready. Only a few select veggies like tomato and garlic are added to a Rasam.
Garlic- Cumin Rasam, Tomato Paruppu Rasam, Archana’s Tomato garlic Rasam,

3.: Paruppu, the plain lentil curry is nothing but boiled and mashed Tuvar dal / Mung dal. It is eaten mixed with rice and ghee. Being such a simple dish, I could’nt find any model recipes at all !
4.: Kootu , the coconut – cumin curry, is made by simmering vegetables in a paste made from coconut, cumin and green chilies. Vidhya’s Spinach Kootu

5.: Paruppu Kootu Add boiled tuvar dal / mung dal to the Kootu above and you have the Paruppu Kootu ( Coconut – cumin- lentil curry) . See 1001 Kootu for more recipes

6.: Thayir pachadi is nothing but raw yogurt in which various salad vegetables / boiled vegetables are mixed. (Uncooked Yogurt curry). This is very similar to a north Indian raita . In fact, garnish a north Indian Raita with a pinch of fried mustard and curry leaves, and it becomes Thayir Pachadi ! See 1001 Raitas for recipes.

7.: More Kulambu . is a spiced buttermilk curry. A soaked mixture of lentils and spices is blended to a paste with green chili and coconut . This paste is mixed with buttermilk and simmered in to a medium thick curry. (In some versions, buttermilk is not cooked but mixed in just before serving). This is vey similar to the north Indian Kadi. Okra More Kuzhambu, Colocasia More Kuzhambu

8.: Poriyal is a dry vegetable curry made by mixing cooked vegetables with flavouring and spices. A variety of steamed / boiled / stir fried / braised / microwaved vegetables can be mixed with flavouring to create scores of poriyals. (Using precooked vegetables greatly reduces cooking time. B’s Cabbage Poriyal, Beans poriyal, Kalai’s Spinach Poriyal, Kribha’s Colocasia Poriyal, Plantain poriyal

9: Pachadi is a sweet and sour curry made by simmering tamarind paste, green chili, salt and sugar /jaggery with goodies. Think of it as a less sour, more sweet Kulambu, cooked without too much spices. It is usually thickened with rice flour. Okra Pachadi

If you have a recipe for a Tamil curry not listed above, please leave a comment. Thanks !

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South Indian Breads
The term ‘bread’ is used here to mean a staple food, cooked from flour, and is eaten everyday.

In the west, the majority of breads are baked from wheat dough. In South India, baking never took off and so most breads are pan fried or steamed. Instead of wheat, the staple cereal is rice and so, it is no surprise we find a variety of rice breads. Most South Indian breads use a combination of rice and lentils, thus meeting both carbohydrate and protein needs.

A word of warning : Despite their apparent simplicity, all these recipes take quite a bit of practice and perseverance to cook up.

South Indian breads fall into six categories :

1. Bread made from fermented rice batter : Aappam
2. Bread made from lentil batter : Pesarattu , Adai
3. Breads made from a fermented batter of rice and urad dal : Idli, Dosa, Uttappam, Paniyaram
4. Breads made from steamed rice / ragi flour : Puttu
5. Breads made from semi cooked rice flour dough : Pathiri / Ada / Akki roti / Kozhukattai
6. Breads made from Wheat dough – Parota

Detailed instructions and great photos here.

Any thick bread needs a leavening agent. The leavening agent fills the batter with gas, puffing it up from the inside, giving the bread a soft, fluffy texture. Without leavening, all we get on cooking is a hard , inedible mess. Wild yeast is the most common leavening agent used in South Indian breads. Leavening is not necessary for thin breads like dosa / pesarattu / pathiri , nor for flaky breads like parota. But without leavening, thick breads like Idli / Uttappam would be tough and chewy.

Aapam
The hemispherical crepe, Aapam (Aa as in audience and pam as in pump) is cooked from a fermented batter of rice flour and water /coconut milk . These are cooked in a hemispherical pan ( wok). The batter is poured into the wok and swirled so that it coats the sides of the wok. Aapam has thin, lacy sides and a spongy base.
Aapam Video

Pesarattu
Pesarattu is a type of dosa popular in Andhra pradesh which uses a batter made from soaked and ground green gram ( Mung dal).

Model Recipes
Indira’s Pesarattu
Akshayapatram’s MLA Pesarattu

Adai
When soaked mixed lentils and grains are ground to a coarse batter and cooked into thick rounds on a hot skillet, we get Adai. A variety of grain and lentil combinations are used to cook numerous varieties of adai.

Model Recipes
Vaishali’s Adai
Quick and easy Adai
Shriya’s Kara Adai

Idli, Dosa, Uttappam & Paniyaram
Idli, Dosa, Uttappam and Paniyaram share the same rice and urad dal batter. This batter is steamed to give Idlis. The same batter is spread into thin rounds on a hot skillet and cooked into crisp dosas. When the same batter is cooked into pancake sized thick discs on a hot skillet, it is called uttappam or kal dosai. When pan fried in small hemispherical moulds, the same batter becomes paniyaram.

Model Recipes
Seema’s Idlis
Indira’s Andhra style rice grit idlis

Sweet Babe’s Dosa

Prema’s Uttappam

Cham’s Paniyaram
Jayasree’s Paniyaram

Puttu
When rice or ragi flour is mixed with water and steamed, we get puttu. Special cylindrical moulds are packed with the flour and steamed. These are popular in rural Tamilnadu and Kerala.

Model Recipes
Saradha’s Ragi Puttu
Lan’s Puttu with a neat technique for keeping it soft.
The not so common Wheat flour Puttu

Pathiri / Ada / Kozhukattai
A variety of rice flour breads are popular in Kerala and Karnataka. Since rice flour does not have gluten, it cannot be kneaded into a dough like wheat flour. So the flour is mixed with boiling water, which cooks it partially into starch. Cooked starch becomes sticky. This sticky dough is shaped into thick or thin rounds, cooked on a skillet or steamed and are called pathiri / ada / akki roti. When shaped into dumplings, and stuffed with sweet / savoury fillings and steamed, these are caled Kozhukattai.

Model Recipes
Annita’s Malabar Pathiri
Mallugirl’s fluffy rice pathiri

Priya’s Stuffed Ada
Surya’s rice and wheat stuffed Ada

Ruchii’s Akki Roti
Aayi’s masala Akki Roti
Aparna’s Akki Roti

Prema’s Kozhukattai
Ammupatti’s Kozhukattai video

Though wheat breads like chapati and poori have now become common in South India, they are yet to attain the status of ‘traditional’ fare. The only wheat bread which is considered traditional is the parota, made from all purpose flour. This thick, multilayered, crumbly bread is completely unlike any other north Indian bread. It is usually cooked on a skillet, but in some places it is deep fried. Layered like a pastry, it is mainly eaten at dinner.

Model Recipes
Annita’s Parota
Renuka’s Parotta with step by step photos

Roasted lentil -chili Powder :: Podi / Pudi

Podi ( literally meaning Powder) is an important part of South Indian cuisine. To make a Podi, various pulses are roasted and ground together with red chili, spices and salt. A variety of podis without lentils are also common, though most have some lentils in them.

They store well and are normally prepared in large batches and stored for months. For a quick meal, mix a podi with cooked, hot rice, add a bit of oil or ghee and dig in. Podis form a big chunk of the baggage South Indians carry abroad. Podis also make excellent accompaniments to idlis and dosas. Podis are very popular especially in Andhra and Tamilnadu. Fried vegetables( especially plantain) are sometimes blended with the lentil- chili mix to create a thick, semi solid podi.

Model Recipes
Sailu’s Kandi Podi – Andhra Style
Sailaja’s peanut podi
Mylapore Mami’s Paruppu Podi
Lalitha’s Pudina Podi
Dhania Podi
Malar’s Plantain Podi

Roasted lentil -chili Powder :: Podi / Pudi

Podi ( literally meaning Powder) is an important part of South Indian cuisine. To make a Podi, various pulses are roasted and ground together with red chili, spices and salt. A variety of podis without lentils are also common, though most have some lentils in them.

They store well and are normally prepared in large batches and stored for months. For a quick meal, mix a podi with cooked, hot rice, add a bit of oil or ghee and dig in. Podis form a big chunk of the baggage South Indians carry abroad. Podis also make excellent accompaniments to idlis and dosas. Podis are very popular especially in Andhra and Tamilnadu. Fried vegetables( especially plantain) are sometimes blended with the lentil- chili mix to create a thick, semi solid podi.

Model Recipes
Sailu’s Kandi Podi – Andhra Style
Sailaja’s peanut podi
Mylapore Mami’s Paruppu Podi
Lalitha’s Pudina Podi
Dhania Podi
Malar’s Plantain Podi

Model Recipes:
Manjula’s Mixed vegetable rice video
LG’s Lentil Rice
Cham’s Vegetable Biriyani
Pongal
Solai’s Sambar Rice
Bhavani’s Tomato Rice

1001 Quickie Dinners
For aspiring cooks, learning to cook rice is a basic survival skill. Thil is the single most important technique I’d recommend. Master this and you’ll never have to worry about food again.

Once cooked rice is ready, you can eat it mixed with plain ghee as ghee rice, or with yogurt as curd rice or with a variety of pickles / podis. This is probably the simplest meal you can cook up. So if there is just one technique you learn, learn to cook rice !

A variety of one pot meals
The trick to cook a thousand varieties of rice is simplicity itself – Mix flavouring and goodies along with rice and cook everything all at once, in a single pot. You now have a full fledged meal ready in the same time it takes to cook rice.

Mind you, this is not how traditional recipes are cooked. In most recipes, rice is cooked separately, the flavouring and vegetables are cooked separately and mixed together.

But when everything is cooked together under pressure, the flavours deeply penetrate the rice and result in a tastier dish ( This is the secret behind the technique of ‘Dum’ where food is cooked in a sealed pot ). You also need just one vessel to feed a crowd.

I taught this technique to my office staff ( all bachelors) and they have now taken to throwing parties, with a minimal kitchen boasting of one gas stove, one knife, one pressure cooker, one ladle and 10 plates !

I use this technique extensively while travelling. I pack a portable gas stove and a pressure cooker in the boot. Feeding up to 12 people is possible in under 20 minutes. One of my fondest memories is cooking Chicken Biriyani for 4 people in 15 minutes in the biting icy mountain breeze on top of Valparai. ( Cooking at high altitudes takes forever – but not so with a pressure cooker!).

Feeding an army on the move
Interestingly, this is exactly how cooks used to feed armies on the move. The last thing you want to do is to make starving, bad tempered soldiers wait for hours for their food !

Take a huge vessel, place a smaller vessel inside, Fill the space between vessels with hot coals. Add rice, flavouring, meat , vegetables and water in the inner vessel. Seal both vessels and string up an array of such vessels between eleplants. The food gets cooked on the move and as soon as the army camps, hot food is ready to be served, As each vessel can feed over a hundred men, it is a snap to feed a large army with very few cooks.

Feeding 20 guests in 20 minutes
You can use the same technique to feed a crowd. A 7 liter pressure cooker can feed 12-14 people. If you have say 25 guests, all you need is two pressure cookers and two piping hot varieties of rice is ready in 20 minutes. And the best thing is that you can spend time with your guests and not in the kitchen.

Just choose a recipe from the table (A handful or rice on cooking becomes three handfuls and is usually sufficient for one person.). Take as many handfuls of rice as there are guests, cook up the flavouring and goodies, add rice and water and you are done. This can even be done beforehand. Then all you need to do is to put the cooker on the stove. that’s it. Nothing is more impressive than feeding a crowd with virtually no equipment. The cleanup is real simple too !

Using the Pressure Cooker
The easiest, fastest and fool proof way to cook rice is to use a pressure cooker.

A pressure cooker has four parts. The vessel, a lid, a rubber ring which fits into the lid, giving a airtight seal and a weight, which is inserted into the spout of the lid. On heating, water becomes steam, filling the cooker. Not able to leak out, the pressure builds up and food is cooked in this pressurised steam. After a while when the pressure rises above a preset value, the steam pushes the weight up and escapes with a loud hiss. This is the first ‘ whistle’. With the venting of steam, the pressure drops and the weight drops back into position on its own. The process repeats itself, and soon we have the second whistle. The time taken for two whistles is usually enough to cook rice.

Get someone to show you how to use a pressure cooker. It will take a couple of minutes and it
is a skill well worth learning !

In a pressure cooker, add a cup of rice. Add two cups of water. Close the cooker , and cook on medium heat for two whistles. Turn off the stove and wait for around 15 minutes for the steam to settle. You can now open the pressure cooker. If the rice is overcooked, add a little less
water the next time. If undercooked, add a bit more. By trial and error you’ll know exactly how much water to add. Most households stick to one variety of rice.

Tips

Presoaking rice for around 30 minutes in water makes it softer.

Rinsing rice in water before cooking it makes it less prone to stick together.

Cook in steam, not in hot air. To remove all air in the cooker, do not fit the weight on top of the cooker till you see a stream of steam coming out of the top hole. This means that the cooker is now completely filled with steam and all air has been driven out. Now place the weight and cook on medium heat for two whistles.

After cooking it takes 10-15 minutes for the steam to settle. To check if the steam has subsided, lift the weight a bit. If steam does not hiss out, it means it is safe to open the cooker.

Never fill up the pressure cooker over half way. Rice expands to nearly thrice its volume on cooking.

Model Recipes:
Here are some of the best recipes for less known Idlis that I came across..
Anita’s Rava Idlis
Simple Indian Food’s Wheat Rava Idli
Usha’s Dal Idli
Manasi’s Gram flour Idlis ( Dhoklas)
Spice Cafe’s Dhoklas
Easycraft’s Ragi Idlis
Andamu’s Corn Idlis
Kamala’s Semiya Idlis

Less Known Idlis
Idlis need not be made from rice alone. In fact the early idlis did not have rice in them, but were made from lentil batter. The basic idea however remains the same. Make a batter from lentils / other cereals, leaven them and steam them and your Idli is ready. This one page cookbook lists these not so common Idlis made from lentils and other cereals.

Model Recipes:
Here are some of the best recipes for less known Idlis that I came across..
Anita’s Rava Idlis
Simple Indian Food’s Wheat Rava Idli
Usha’s Dal Idli
Manasi’s Gram flour Idlis ( Dhoklas)
Spice Cafe’s Dhoklas
Easycraft’s Ragi Idlis
Andamu’s Corn Idlis
Kamala’s Semiya Idlis

Less Known Idlis
Idlis need not be made from rice alone. In fact the early idlis did not have rice in them, but were made from lentil batter. The basic idea however remains the same. Make a batter from lentils / other cereals, leaven them and steam them and your Idli is ready. This one page cookbook lists these not so common Idlis made from lentils and other cereals.