For the best Palappams

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The “palappam” considered a specialty in Kerala owes its origin to the Jews. The ingredients that go into the making of this dish are rice flour fine ground raw rice, sieved well). Coconuts, fresh toddy, soda powder, a little sugar and salt to taste. The raw rice may be ground with water to prepare appam. To make softer palappams, there are many techniques you could employ. To one and a half cup water, add half cup flour retained on the sieve while sieving (called the “thari”) cook well and add the same to the appam dough when mixing. Another alternative to this would be adding Bombay rava cooked in water in the same proportion. Coconut milk from two cups of scraped coconut enough for the right consistency of the appam batter is mixed with the rice dough along with two teaspoons of sugar and a pinch of salt and kept aside the might before. The next day morning add the soda powder and you can start making hot delicious palappams, since fresh toddy is difficult to get, many use yeast nowadays.

Now, when using yeast the proportion shall be: one teaspoon yeast, two teaspoons of warm water (milk is a better alternative) and one teaspoon sugar. The three are mixed and kept aside for fermenting. If the yeast is of good quality, fermentation takes place in 15 minutes. Palappams can be made without coconuts too! Two cups of raw rice are ground well with half cup of cooked raw rice (in multiples of this proportion as per requirement) to which the fermented yeast is added and the batter is kept aside the night before. The next day morning you may start making appams and you can bet that no one will guess the appams don’t contain coconut milk. An house before making the appams add an egg beaten with maida to the batter and your palappams remain fresh and tasty as ever, even hours after they are made.

When making appams, keep stirring the batter as frequently as you can and pouring small quantities into a small sized bowl makes the stirring process more handy. Stirring the whole fermented batter which comes bubbling up may cause the appams to lose their softness. Sometimes when making appams, the batter clings onto your pan and you need to use all your efforts to keep them presentable and in shape. Still worse sometimes the appam just refuses to get off the pan. In such cases, here’s what you should do. Break an egg and pour it on the hot appam pan. Roll out the omlette and use it to dab oil on the pan before making each appam. Not another appam will ever stick on the pan. Now, here’s yet another tip, quite unknown, for making soft appams. Take one cup of tender coconut water/coconut water in a bottle to which one teaspoon sugar, one teaspoon raw rice, ¼ teaspoon soda powder and salt are added and mixed well. This is kept for a day near the stove so that it is warmed up. Palappams may now be prepare adding this mixture to the dough. The rice flour used to make the palappam, if steamed for half an hour before making the batter, makes the appams extra soft.