Puttu
This is a typical breakfast dish and a favourite in Kerala. It is a steamed cake made of roasted rice powder, cylindrical in shape and six to seven inches long.
Ingradients
Roasted rice powder slightly coarse – 2 cups
Salt – to taste
Grated coconut – 1 to 2 cups
Preparation
Put the rice powder in a small basin. Add salt and a little water and mix well. Keep adding water little by little and continue to mix well rubbing together the rice powder until it becomes moist and soft.
Take a handful of the moist powder and press it together to make a small ball. If the ball thus made crumbles easily the rice powder for the puttu is ready. Put it into the mixie and grind it for just a second. This helps to break up any lumps in the moist rice powder. Mix the coconut and keep aside for half an hour.
Steam the whole in a suitable steamer until done. Just as palappam is best when it is made in the palappa chatty, puttu is made ideally in a special contraption called `puttukutti’ which is a long cylindrical container through which steam is channelized. If such a container is not available one can devise a home made puttu steamer.
Take the half of the coconut shell which has the three distinctive spots or eyes. Pierce the most prominent eye and scoop it out in order to make a proper hole. Put grated coconut at the bottom in order to close the hole. Then fill it with the moist rice powder and top it with more grated coconut. Place this coconut vessel over the vent of the pressure cooker which has water boiling in it.
After 1 or 2 minutes the steam will issue out of the top of the coconut vessel. Let the steam rise for a few more minutes and then remove. Place another coconut shell similarly fashioned and filled with the prepared rice powder on the pressure cooker and continue the process. Invert the coconut shell on to a serving dish after a few minutes and the puttu is ready.
Puttu can be eaten with sugar, ripe plantains, ghee etc. Bengalgram curry, greengram thoran, egg curry are ideal combinations with puttu.
The coconut shell if immersed in water for a week and then scraped on the outside in order to make it smooth, will not only look nice but also last for several years.