1001 South Indian Breads

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 / kal dosai / Set 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

Unlike the breads listed above, which cut across regions and have their variants in more than one state, there are other delightful local breads like the multi layered wholewheat parotta found in Kerala ( Thanks Mallugirl !) or the Jonna Roti ( made from Jowar / Sorghum / Cholam ) popular in parts of Andhra / Karnataka. If you know of any other breads, would you please mail me / comment ?

This post is reposted for Aparna's Small Breads & Srivalli’s Roti Mela

1001 Idlis

Model Idlis
For detailed recipes, here are some of the best blogs I came across..
Mahanandi's rice grit Idlis
Nupur's Kanchipuram Idli with a running commentary on the problems faced
Inbavalli's Kanchipuram Idli
Rupa's plate Idlis
Mahanandi's Rosematta Idlis made from red rice
Anjalis pictures of Idli's in a Jackfruit leaf cup
Shantihhh's Idli Video
Lakshmi's Raw rice Idlis

Idli - A Primer
Idli is the much loved and most common breakfast food in South India . It is hard to define what an idli is. You could say idli is a steamed cake made from a fermented batter of rice and urad dal. But you have varieties of idlis made without rice, without urad dal and without fermentation !

So my working definition is that Idli is not a dish, but a technique of steaming a batter into a fluffy cake. For a long time, Idlis were made from lentil batter and did not have rice in them.

The first recorded mention of something similar to an Idli is in the Kannada book Vaddaradhane written 1100 years back, where iddalige ( urad dal cakes) is listed as one of eighteen items ritually served to a brahmachari (celibate student).

Another 1000 year old inscription records that lentils were first soaked overnight in buttermilk, ground to a batter, seasoned with pepper, coriander, cumin & asafetida and then cooked into a dish resembling an Idli.

A few centuries later, rice was added to this lentil batter, giving rise to the idlis we know today. Dr. K.T. Achaya, the food scientist and historian argues that unlike dosa and vada, Idli is a foreign import.

Unlike China / South east Asia, fermenting and steaming were techniques not widely practised in India. The Chinese chronicler Xuang Zang (7th century AD) asserts that there were no steaming vessels in India. Even today, very few Indian recipes call for steaming. With no cheese making / wine making tradition, fermentation was also not clearly understood in ancient India.

Achaya argues that around 800 years back, it was customary for the Hindu Kings of Indonesia to visit South India for brides. The cooks who accompanied them brought the fermenting and steaming methods and their dish Kedli, (the probable ancestor of Idli) to South India.

Any cake or bread needs a leavening agent. The leavening agent fills the dough / batter with gas puffing it up from the inside, giving a fluffy texture. Without this, all we'll get on cooking is a hard , inedible mess. Yeast is the most common leavening agent in most breads and idlis.

When idli batter is left overnight in a warm place, wild yeast ferments it, filling it with carbon di oxide, puffing up the batter to over twice its original volume.

Soaked Urad dal on grinding gets filled with air and becomes a foam. Rice does not have this ability and becomes a dense paste on grinding. So for real soft idlis, the dal is ground separately into a foam and the soaked rice is ground coarsely. Both are mixed together and left to ferment. In an ideal batter we have coarsely ground rice grits suspended in a foamy dal matrix.

The gas produced by the leavening agent is trapped in this foamy matrix. On heating, this gas expands, giving us fluffy idlis . The numerous small holes you see on tearing an idli were created by pockets of expanded gas.

All techniques of making soft fluffy idlis have just one goal :
Make the batter hold as much gas as possible.

This is possible only if the leavening agent works well and the gases formed do not leak out but remain trapped in this foamy matrix.

The batter won't rise if it is too cold as yeast becomes dormant at low temperatures. Addition of iodine ( from iodized salt) or chlorine ( from chlorinated tap water) kills / slows down yeast and prevent the batter from rising.

To trap the gas, it is essential that you grind the soaked urad dal till light and fluffy without adding too much water. It should almost be a foam. If you drop a pinch of batter in water, it should float. Using whole husked urad dal gives the best results.

If the batter gets hot while griding it lowers its ability to trap gas. So traditionally, high speed blenders are not used. Instead slow speed stone grinders are preferred. However you can avoid heating up the batter by

1. Use ice water / cubes in place of water while grinding.
2. Let the dal soak in water overnight inside a fridge.
3. Not running the blender continuously, but in short bursts.

Remember that the batter is filled with gas. So vigorously mixing the batter before steaming lets some of the precious gas out.

Urad dal batter can lift up dramatically on steaming. However, it lacks the mechanical strength to maintain its puffed state. So a batter with too much dal will puff up but deflate as fast!

Rice batter is dense and does not trap air like the dal batter and so does not lift up. So an idly with too much rice will be hard.

Fenugreek seeds and castor seeds ( Kottaimuthu / Aamanakku) create a better quality foamy matrix than urad dal and can dramatically puff up idlis. But they leave a bitter aftertaste and so are used sparingly. Fenugreek batter also gives a sheen to idly surface and prevents it from sticking to the pan.

Ideally a ratio of 3 parts of rice to one part of dal seems to work best. A pinch of fenugreek seeds / castor beans is also used.

Tamils consume two varieties of rice - the raw rice and the semi cooked (parboiled) rice. Raw rice has the husk removed and polished. Parboiled rice is boiled in the husk, and then has the husk removed and polished. Parboiled rice is easier to cook and more nutritious than raw rice. Short parboiled rice ( called idly rice) is the most common rice used for idlis. If idly rice is not available, substitute with any short grained rice like Risotto rice (arborio) or Japanese rice (Mochi)/ Rosematta rice.