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Festive Food: Nei Appam

Appam is a sweet dish usually made for almost all festivals! It is also my granddaughter's favorite sweet.

Here is a step by step to make this traditional recipe.

Ingredients

• Rice or rice powder - 1/2 Cup of rice or 1 Cup of rice powder (one glass of rice when powdered gives two glasses of rice powder)
• Jaggery - 1/2 Cup of jaggery made into small pieces
• Cardamom powder
• Ripe banana
• Ghee to fry

Special Kitchen Equipment:

You need the traditional Appa Karal and Needle

If in the USA, you can even make do with an Ableskiver Pan*

Procedure

Soak rice in water for at least two hours.

Drain the water and grind it with very little water and make a thick paste.

Now add jaggery pieces and grind and make it into a smooth paste. After grinding with jaggery the batter becomes little more watery.

Note: You can microwave the jaggery for two minutes so that it melts and becomes soft. You can add the melted jaggery little by little and grind.

Or

You can dissolve the jaggery with a small amount of water and heat in a low flame to melt it and then add to the thick rice batter and grind.

The above clues are for saving your mixie.

(If you are doing with rice powder, add the melted jaggery water to the rice powder. Puree the banana and add the puree to the batter)

Now add the ripe banana and grind nicely.

The final batter should be neither too thick nor too watery somewhat should have the consistency of an idli batter.

Add the cardamom (elaichi) powder.

The batter is ready. Now allow it to ferment for two hours.

Keep the special pan on the gas (appakaral) and pour ghee into the depression. Don't fill the depression fully with ghee. Fill only 3/4 th of it.

When the ghee is heated (very important else the batter will stick to the depression and it will be difficult to flip it later).

Now add the batter till it fills half of the depression. (It is always good to have deep depressions in the pan as the appam will turn out to be soft as it has more batter in it)

Cook in a medium flame. Halfway through flip the appam so that the other side is cooked.

Cook till the appam turns brown.

Poke the appam with the appam needle. If the batter does not stick to the needle it means it is done.

Remove the appams and put it in the vessel. 

 Image credits: Radha